T&T Clark Companion to the Theology of Kierkegaard 9780567667076, 9780567667106, 9780567667090

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1 Prologue: The Concept of Kierkegaard Companions (with Constant Reference to Theology)
Part One Preliminary Interpretative Issues
2 Kierkegaard on Communication: Refusing to ‘Piddle’
3 Kierkegaard on Language: Peril and Promise
4 Kierkegaard on Doctrine: The Grammar of Christian Pathos
5 Kierkegaard on the Church: Between Rejection and Redemption
Part Two Kierkegaard’s Theological Biography
6 Kierkegaard the Theology Student
7 Kierkegaard the Reader of Scripture
8 Kierkegaard the Preacher
9 Kierkegaard’s Theological Legacy
Part Three Key Doctrinal Themes
10 Trinity: A Concept Ubiquitous Yet Unthematized
11 The Divine Attributes: Kierkegaard’s Broodings on the Godhead
12 Providence: Right in Front of Our Noses?
13 Creation: By, For and Before God
14 Theological Anthropology: Spirit as the Self ‘Before’ and ‘Resting in’ God
15 Sin: Leaping and Sliding and Mysteries Pointing to Mysteries
16 Revelation: What Forms of Authority, and to Whom?
17 Christology: Ecce Homo!
18 Justification: ‘The Article by Which the Church Stands or Falls’?
19 Sanctification: Kierkegaard and the Journey Towards Rest
20 The Holy Spirit: Kierkegaard’s Understated Pneumatology
21 Faith: The Infinite Task of Passionate Belief
22 The Christian Life: A Humble Striving Born of Gratitude
23 Love: A Holy Caprice
24 Eschatology: ‘And Eternally Speak with My Jesus’
Part Four Theological Trajectories
25 Kierkegaard, Theology and the Academy
26 Kierkegaard, Theology and the Information Society
27 Kierkegaard, Theology and Literary Media
28 Kierkegaard, Theology and Post-Christendom
29 Epilogue: A Kind of Theologian
Index

Citation preview

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T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

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T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

Edited by Aaron P. Edwards and David J. Gouwens

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 This paperback edition published in 2022 Copyright © Aaron P. Edwards, David J. Gouwens and Contributors, 2020 Aaron P. Edwards and David J. Gouwens have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xv constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © nikamata / Getty All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Edwards, Aaron (Lecturer in Theology), editor. Title: T&T Clark companion to the theology of Kierkegaard / edited by Aaron P. Edwards and David J. Gouwens. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York: T&T Clark, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019007760 | ISBN 9780567667076 (hardback) | ISBN 9780567667090 (epdf) Subjects: LCSH: Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813–1855. | Theology. | Theology, Doctrinal. Classification: LCC BX4827.K5 T2195 2019 | DDC 230/.044092–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007760 ISBN: HB: 978-0-5676-6707-6 PB: 978-1-3503-2035-2 ePDF: 978-0-5676-6709-0 ePUB: 978-0-5676-6708-3 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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With thanks to our patient spouses, Molly and Sharon

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CONTENTS

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C ONTRIBUTORS

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS L IST

OF

A BBREVIATIONS

1 Prologue: The Concept of Kierkegaard Companions (with Constant Reference to Theology) Aaron P. Edwards Part One Preliminary Interpretative Issues

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2 Kierkegaard on Communication: Refusing to ‘Piddle’ Kyle Roberts

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3 Kierkegaard on Language: Peril and Promise Randall C. Zachman

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4 Kierkegaard on Doctrine: The Grammar of Christian Pathos Lee C. Barrett

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5 Kierkegaard on the Church: Between Rejection and Redemption Matthew D. Kirkpatrick

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Part Two Kierkegaard’s Theological Biography 6 Kierkegaard the Theology Student George Pattison

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7 Kierkegaard the Reader of Scripture Joel D. S. Rasmussen

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8 Kierkegaard the Preacher Aaron P. Edwards

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9 Kierkegaard’s Theological Legacy Lee C. Barrett

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Part Three Key Doctrinal Themes

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10 Trinity: A Concept Ubiquitous Yet Unthematized Paul Martens

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CONTENTS

11 The Divine Attributes: Kierkegaard’s Broodings on the Godhead Joel D. S. Rasmussen

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12 Providence: Right in Front of Our Noses? Nathan Paylor

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13 Creation: By, For and Before God Andrew B. Torrance

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14 Theological Anthropology: Spirit as the Self ‘Before’ and ‘Resting in’ God Simon D. Podmore

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15 Sin: Leaping and Sliding and Mysteries Pointing to Mysteries Jason A. Mahn

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16 Revelation: What Forms of Authority, and to Whom? Tomas Bokedal

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17 Christology: Ecce Homo! Sylvia Walsh

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18 Justification: ‘The Article by Which the Church Stands or Falls’? David J. Gouwens

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19 Sanctification: Kierkegaard and the Journey Towards Rest Christopher B. Barnett

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20 The Holy Spirit: Kierkegaard’s Understated Pneumatology Murray Rae

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21 Faith: The Infinite Task of Passionate Belief Matthew F. Wilson and C. Stephen Evans

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22 The Christian Life: A Humble Striving Born of Gratitude Philip G. Ziegler

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23 Love: A Holy Caprice Amy Laura Hall

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24 Eschatology: ‘And Eternally Speak with My Jesus’ Andrew J. Burgess

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Part Four Theological Trajectories

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25 Kierkegaard, Theology and the Academy Stanley Hauerwas

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26 Kierkegaard, Theology and the Information Society Brian Brock

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27 Kierkegaard, Theology and Literary Media Eric Ziolkowski

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28 Kierkegaard, Theology and Post-Christendom Merold Westphal

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29 Epilogue: A Kind of Theologian David J. Gouwens

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I NDEX

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CONTRIBUTORS

Christopher B. Barnett is Associate Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. His scholarly books include Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (2011), From Despair to Faith: The Spirituality of Søren Kierkegaard (2014) and Theology and the Films of Terrence Malick (coedited with Clark J. Elliston, 2016). His major research interests involve modern philosophy and theology, Christian spirituality and the relationship between religion and secular culture. He is currently working on two book-length projects, Scorsese as Theologian and Kierkegaard and the Question Concerning Technology. Lee C. Barrett is the Henry and Mary Stager Professor of Theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary. He has served as a frequent contributor and editorial consultant for the International Kierkegaard Commentary series and the Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources series. His more recent books include Kierkegaard (Abingdon Pillars of Theology) (2010), Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (2013) and T&T Clark Reader in Kierkegaard as Theologian (2018). Tomas Bokedal (ThD, Lund University) is Lecturer in New Testament at King’s College, University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He previously taught theology at the Lutheran School of Theology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Bokedal’s primary fields of research concern Christian origins and the relation of ‘Scripture and Theology’. He is the author of The Formation and Significance of the Christian Biblical Canon: A Study in Text, Ritual and Interpretation (2014). Among his present major projects are a study on the Rule of Faith in biblical interpretation, and a monograph on the concepts of freedom and despair in Kierkegaard. Brian Brock is Reader in Moral and Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen. His main work has been on the ethics of technological development (Christian Ethics in a Technological Age, 2010) and on the use of the Bible in Christian ethics (Singing the Ethos of God, 2007; and two volumes on First Corinthians edited with Bernd Wannenwetsch: The Malady of the Christian Body, 2016, and The Therapy of the Christian Body, 2018). He has also engaged in theological work in a conversational format, most recently with Stanley Hauerwas (Beginnings: Interrogating Hauerwas, 2017; Captive to Christ, Open to the World, 2014). With Professor John Swinton he has edited Theology, Disability and the New Genetics: Why Science Needs the Church (2007), Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader (2012) and A Graceful Embrace: Theological Reflections on Adopting Children (2017). As Managing Editor of the Journal of Religion and Disability, he has written a wide range of scholarly essays on themes related to disability. He is also founder and Managing Editor of the academic monograph series T&T Clark Enquiries in Theological Ethics. Andrew J. Burgess is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus of the University of New Mexico. For twenty-five years he was Director of the UNM Religious Studies Program. His most

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recent books are an edited volume Kierkegaard: East and West (2011) and a co-edited volume Kierkegaard and Classical Greek Thought (2018). His main research interests are in systematic theology, philosophical theology and the philosophy of religion. Aaron P. Edwards is Lecturer in Theology, Preaching and Mission at Cliff College, Derbyshire, UK. Before this, he was a teaching fellow in Divinity at the University of Aberdeen, lecturing on religion, politics and cultural crisis. He is widely published in various areas of theology, philosophy and missiology in numerous academic journals, particularly on the thought of Kierkegaard and the theology of preaching. He also has research interests in the thought of Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Reformers and the Great Awakeners, and has spoken at numerous academic conferences in Chicago, Durham, Edinburgh, London, Birmingham, Baltimore, Copenhagen and others. He is the author of A Theology of Preaching and Dialectic: Scriptural Tension, Heraldic Proclamation, and the Pneumatological Moment (2018). C. Stephen Evans is University Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Baylor University. His most recent scholarly books are God and Moral Obligation (2013), Natural Signs and Knowledge of God: A New Look at Theistic Arguments (2010) and Kierkegaard: An Introduction (2009). Evans was formerly Curator of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St Olaf College. His major research interests include meta-ethics, philosophy of religion, philosophical theology and the philosophy of psychology. David J. Gouwens is Professor Emeritus of Theology at Brite Divinity School. He is the author of Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of the Imagination (1989) and Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (1996). With Lee C. Barrett III he co-edited the three volumes of The Paul L. Holmer Papers (2012), including On Kierkegaard and the Truth; Thinking the Faith with Passion: Selected Essays; and Communicating the Faith Indirectly: Selected Sermons, Addresses, and Prayers. He has served as volume consultant and contributor to the International Kierkegaard Commentary series and President of the Søren Kierkegaard Society of North America. In addition to Kierkegaard’s thought, his major research interests include Christology, theological hermeneutics, Karl Barth and theological aesthetics in the Reformed tradition. Amy Laura Hall is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke University Divinity School. She is the author of Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love (2002), Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction (2007), Writing Home, With Love: Politics for Neighbors and Naysayers (2016) and most recently Laughing at the Devil: Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich (2018). Her current research focuses on masculinity in mainstream, white, evangelical Christianity. She also works with the AFL-CIO, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and with local organizations committed to public education. Stanley Hauerwas is Gilbert T. Rowe Professor Emeritus of Divinity and Law at Duke University. Hauerwas was named ‘America’s Best Theologian’ by Time magazine in 2001 and is still widely regarded as one of the most significant theological thinkers of the contemporary era. He is the author of numerous books, including After Christendom?: How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (1991), Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life (2013) and The Work of Theology (2015). His book, A Community of Character: Toward a

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Constructive Christian Social Ethic (1981), was selected as one of the 100 most important religious books of the twentieth century. Matthew D. Kirkpatrick is Lecturer in Ethics and Doctrine at Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford. He is author of Attacks on Christendom in a World Come of Age: Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and the Question of ‘Religionless Christianity’ (2011) and editor of Engaging Bonhoeffer: The Impact and Influence of Bonhoeffer’s Life and Thought (2016). His research interests include particular attention to the interplay of existentialism and Christianity, the theology of death, sexual ethics in relation to the identity of children and the wider thought of Kierkegaard and Bonhoeffer. Jason A. Mahn is Associate Professor of Religion and Director of the Presidential Center for Faith and Learning at Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois. He is the author of Fortunate Fallibility: Kierkegaard and the Power of Sin (2011) and Becoming a Christian in Christendom: Radical Discipleship and the Way of the Cross in America’s ‘Christian’ Culture (2016). His primary area of research is in constructive Christian theology. Paul Martens is Associate Professor of Religion and Director of Interdisciplinary Programs in the College of Arts and Sciences at Baylor University. He recently published Reading Kierkegaard I: Fear and Trembling (2017) and co-edited (with C. Stephen Evans) Kierkegaard and Christian Faith (2016). His research interests are primarily in theology and ethics, especially Anabaptism, global ethics, non-violence and environmental ethics. George Pattison is 1640 Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow and a Fellow of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Research in Cultural and Social Studies (Erfurt). He has published extensively in Kierkegaard studies, including co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard (2013) and Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century (2012). He is currently working on a three-volume philosophy of Christian life, the first part of which is entitled A Phenomenology of the Devout Life (2018). Nathan Paylor is an adjunct lecturer at Cliff College, Derbyshire, UK. Previously he was a visiting lecturer in Theology at the University of Chester, and is the founder of Theology That Sings, an inter-denominational ecclesial theology project based in Chester, UK. He has also given papers at academic conferences including The Society for the Study of Theology, and Missio Dei, and has contributed to the journal, Holiness (Wesley House, Cambridge). His main field of research is Reformed Theology and Reformation Thought. Simon D. Podmore is Associate Professor in Systematic Theology at Liverpool Hope University. His publications include Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (2011) and Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial (2013). His research explores the confluences between constructive, philosophical and mystical theology; psychotherapy and the arts. Murray Rae is Professor of Theology at the University of Otago. His research interests include the work of Søren Kierkegaard, theological hermeneutics, Ma¯ori engagements with Christianity and theology and architecture. His publications include Architecture and Theology: The Art of Place (2017), Christian Theology: The Basics (2015), Kierkegaard and Theology (2010), History and Hermeneutics (2005) and Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation (1997). Joel D. S. Rasmussen is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, and a tutorial fellow of Mansfield College. He is also an associate

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member of the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford, and a senior research fellow of Campion Hall. Rasmussen is the author of Between Irony and Witness: Kierkegaard's Poetics of Faith, Hope, and Love (2005); one of the editors of Kierkegaard's Journals and Notebooks (2007–); co-editor of William James and the Transatlantic Conversation: Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Philosophy of Religion (2014); and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought (2017). His major research interests include historical and philosophical theology, with a focus on the interactions of religion, philosophy and literature in modernity. Kyle Roberts is Dean and Schilling Professor of Public Theology and Church and Economic Life at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. His books include Matthew: The Two Horizons New Testament Commentary (co-authored with Jeannine Brown) (2018), A Complicated Pregnancy: Whether Mary Was a Virgin and Why It Matters (2017) and Emerging Prophet: Kierkegaard and the Postmodern People of God (2013). He is currently researching a theology of sin at the intersection of theological existentialism and contemporary culture. Andrew B. Torrance is Lecturer in Theology at the University of St Andrews and co-founder of the Logos Institute for Analytic and Exegetical Theology. He is author of the book, The Freedom to Become a Christian: A Kierkegaardian Account of Human Transformation in Relationship with God (2016). He has co-edited two volumes on creation, Knowing Creation: Perspectives from Theology, Philosophy, and Science (2018) and Christ and the Created Order (2018). He has also published numerous articles in journals, including Religious Studies, Modern Theology, Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, International Journal of Systematic Theology and Journal of Analytic Theology. Sylvia Walsh is Scholar in Residence at Stetson University. Her major fields of research are Kierkegaard and Feminist theology. She is the author of Kierkegaard and Religion: Personality, Character, and Virtue (2018), Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode (2009), Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence (2005), Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics (1994); translator of Kierkegaard’s Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (2011) and Fear and Trembling (2006) and co-editor of Feminist Interpretations of Kierkegaard (1997). Merold Westphal is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Fordham University in New York City. He has served as President of the Hegel Society of America and of the Søren Kierkegaard Society and as Executive Co-Director of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). He is the author of thirteen books and scores of articles and chapters in continental philosophy, with a focus on the philosophy of religion. He has lectured widely in the United States and Europe as well as in China and Brazil. Matthew F. Wilson is Director of Academic Programs and Research Associate at the Program on Integrative Knowledge and Human Flourishing at Harvard University. In addition to studying Kierkegaard, his scholarly interests include moral philosophy, applied ethics and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of ‘Is Epistemic Permissivism a Consistent Position to Argue from?’ in the Southwest Philosophy Review 33, no. 1 (2017), and has co-written for the online philosophy blog The Critique. Matthew received his PhD in Philosophy from Baylor University in 2018.

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Randall C. Zachman is Professor Emeritus of Reformation Studies at the University of Notre Dame, and author of The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (2005), John Calvin as Teacher, Pastor, and Theologian: The Shape of His Writings and Thought (2006), Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin (2007) and Reconsidering John Calvin (2012), which bring Calvin into conversation with Kierkegaard, among others. He is currently Adjunct Professor of Church History at Lancaster Theological Seminary. Philip G. Ziegler is Professor of Christian Dogmatics at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of Doing Theology When God is Forgotten: The Theological Achievement of Wolf Krötke (2007) and Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology (2018). He has edited and co-edited a number of works including The Providence of God (2009), Explorations in Christian Theology and Ethics: Essays in Conversation with Paul L. Lehmann (2016), Christ, Church and World: New Studies in Bonhoeffer’s Theology and Ethics (2016) and Eternal God, Eternal Life: Theological Investigations into the Concept of Immortality (2018). Within the wide field of modern Christian theology, his leading research interests include the theological legacies of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the contemporary restatement of eschatological and soteriological doctrines. Eric Ziolkowski is H. P. Manson Professor of Bible, and Head of the Department of Religious Studies, at Lafayette College. His most recent scholarly books include Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts (2018), The Bible in Folklore Worldwide, vol. 1: A Handbook of Biblical Reception in Jewish, European Christian, and Islamic Folklores (2017) and The Literary Kierkegaard (2011). Formerly the North American Senior Editor of Literature and Theology: An International Journal of Religion, Theory and Culture (2004–2012), he is a main editor of the prospective thirty-volume Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (2009–; sixteen volumes published to date), and co-edits two book series: Studies in Religion and the Arts, and Studies of the Bible and Its Reception.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Each chapter of this volume was specially commissioned and we acknowledge with gratitude first of all the contributors for their passion and conviction that Kierkegaard, as a ‘kind of theologian’, deserves such extensive exploration. We thank Joel D. S. Rasmussen for adapting and updating for his chapter ‘Kierkegaard the Reader of Scripture’ his earlier essay, ‘Kierkegaard’s Biblical Hermeneutics: Imitation, Imaginative Freedom, and Paradoxical Fixation’, in Kierkegaard and the Bible: Tome II: The New Testament, ed. Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 1: tome II (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 249–84. Copyright Joel D. S. Rasmussen. Lee C. Barrett, Iben Damgaard and Jon Stewart deserve special thanks for their good counsel on this project, as do our editors at T&T Clark, Anna Turton and Sarah Blake, for their advice and patience. Ronald M. Green and Randall Balmer of Dartmouth College generously lent their assistance in obtaining Visiting Scholar privileges at the Dartmouth College Library, Hanover, New Hampshire. We wish to express particular appreciation to the Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library at St Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota. Although we have not used the Hong Library during the editing of this particular volume, we recognize how it has always been a refreshing haven for many of us within Kierkegaard scholarship and has been of wonderful service to a number of the contributors to this volume. We hope it will continue in its mission for the encouragement and flourishing of Kierkegaardian studies for many years to come. Indiana University Press has kindly given permission to quote from Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, vol. 1, 1967; vol. 2, 1970; vols 3 and 4, 1975; vols 5–7, 1978. Courtesy of Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. Princeton University Press has given permission to quote from Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, series eds, Kierkegaard’s Writings, 26 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978–2000, including the following volumes, all reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press in the format Book via Copyright Clearance Center (full bibliographical information for each volume is given in the List of Abbreviations): The Book on Adler, Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!, Practice in Christianity, Philosophical Fragments and ‘Johannes Climacus’, The Sickness unto Death, and Works of Love. Finally, we thank Princeton University Press for permission to quote from Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vols 1–11, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007–, including Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vol. 3, by Kierkegaard, Søren. Københavns Universitet. Søren Kierkegaard

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Forskningscenteret. Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press in the format Book via Copyright Clearance Center. Biblical quotations are from Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version with Apocrypha. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

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ABBREVIATIONS

KIERKEGAARD IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION We are grateful to the late Robert L. Perkins for permission to use in our footnotes the sigla, now standard for Kierkegaard scholars, that he devised as editor of the International Kierkegaard Commentary. AN ASKB BA CA CD

CI

COR CUP

CUP2

EO1 EO2 EPW EUD FPOSL FSE FT

‘Armed Neutrality’. See The Point of View. The Auctioneer’s Sales Record of the Library of Søren Kierkegaard, ed. H. P. Rohde. Copenhagen: The Royal Library, 1967. The Book on Adler, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. The Concept of Irony together with ‘Notes on Schelling’s Berlin Lectures’, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. The Corsair Affair, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, volume 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, volume 2, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Either/Or, volume 1, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Either/Or, volume 2, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Early Polemical Writings, ed. and trans. Julia Watkin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. From the Papers of One Still Living. See Early Polemical Writings. For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.

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JC JFY JP

KJN

LD OMWA P PC PF PV

R SLW SUD TA

TDIO TM TSI UDVS WA WL

ABBREVIATIONS

Johannes Climacus or ‘De omnibus dubitandum est’. See Philosophical Fragments. Judge for Yourself! See For Self-Examination. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, vol. 1, 1967; vol. 2, 1970; vols 3 and 4, 1975; vols 5–7, 1978. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vols 1–11, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble and K. Brian Söderquist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007–. Letters and Documents, trans. Hendrik Rosenmeier. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. On My Work as an Author. See The Point of View. Prefaces and ‘Writing Sampler’, ed. and trans. Todd W. Nichol. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Practice in Christianity, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Philosophical Fragments and ‘Johannes Climacus’, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. The Point of View, including On My Work as an Author, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, ‘The Single Individual’ and ‘Armed Neutrality’, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Repetition. See Fear and Trembling. Stages on Life’s Way, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. The Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. ‘The Moment’ and Late Writings, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. ‘The Single Individual’. See The Point of View. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Without Authority, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

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ABBREVIATIONS

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KIERKEGAARD IN DANISH SKP

SKS

SKSK SV1 SV2

Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, second enlarged edn by Niels Thulstrup, with index vols 14–16 by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, 28 vols, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, Alastair McKinnon and Finn Hauberg Mortensen. Since 2009, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Johnny Kondrup, Tonny Aagaard Olesen and Steen Tullberg. Published by Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret. Copenhagen: Gads, 1997–2013. Online version: http://www.sks.dk/forside/indhold.asp. Kommentar til Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, 27 vols. Published by Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret. Copenhagen: Gads, 1997–2013. Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker, 1st edn, 14 vols, ed. A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1901–06. Søren Kierkegaards Samlede Værker, 2nd edn, 15 vols, ed. A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1920–36.

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CHAPTER ONE

Prologue: The Concept of Kierkegaard Companions (with Constant Reference to Theology) AARON P. EDWARDS

ON THE INAPPROPRIATENESS OF KIERKEGAARD COMPANIONS It is difficult to think of a theological thinker in the modern era for whom the notion of an academic ‘companion’ might seem less appropriate. Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), one of the most influential thinkers of the modern age, is perhaps known above all else as the staunch individualist, whose subjectivity in all things rendered him a lonely isolationist, scribbling away in profound but idiosyncratic obscurity as the world passed by around him. His anti-academic and furious anticlerical leanings also hardly endear him to the academic theological guild. What on earth are all these Kierkegaard scholars doing busying themselves with his theology, and would he even care? Certainly, the caricature of Kierkegaard as the anti-theological isolationist has been wheeled out copiously over the last hundred years or so and mirrors the kind of parodying he experienced first-hand in his own time and in his own city. Most famously we see this in that iconic cartoon image which appeared in The Corsair newspaper in 1846, depicting the silhouette of the comically pretentious philosopher, standing stick in hand at the centre of the universe.1 As with all caricatures, there is, in that image, both a hyperbolic falsification and a faint resonance of some truth. Kierkegaard was indeed an individualist, though certainly not an isolationist. He had his companions, and his companions had him. But the fundamental centre of gravity of his thinking was set against the communitarian ideologies of his age, against what he called ‘the crowd’, the sense of groupthink that distorts the possibility of truth being received and enacted by the individual in the crowd’s midst. This was Kierkegaard’s perennial refrain across his authorship, particularly that which was overtly theological, or ‘religious’. On 1 August 1835, in one of his early and most

1

COR, 133.

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T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

memorable journal entries, in which he is contemplating his future and searching for the idea for which he might live and die, he says, ‘With few exceptions my companions have had no special influence upon me.’2 One could not say this remained the case for his whole life in every sense, but it remained true to the extent that he remained perennially suspicious of any movement of thought that might threaten the individual’s capacity to challenge ‘untruth’ wherever it might be found. What possible hope can a ‘Companion’ volume have of avoiding his own piercing reproach, not least when the subject is – of all things – theology? For if there is one place in his own time where Kierkegaard felt ‘untruth’ was most devilishly at work, it was theology.

KIERKEGAARD’S THEOLOGICAL ‘REPUTATION’ There is a curious scene in the play written about Kierkegaard’s life by the Irish poet, Augustus Young (1943–) which gets at the heart of Kierkegaard’s love–hate relationship with theology. In the scene, Kierkegaard upsets the pleasant mood of a dinner party by making a particularly hostile speech against one of his guests, the great fairy-tale writer, Hans Christian Andersen. One of Kierkegaard’s acquaintances, Israel Levin, interjects by saying, ‘Don’t mind Søren, he’s had a bad day today. He passed his final Divinity exam.’3 Many might even be surprised that Kierkegaard took a Divinity exam at all, though perhaps would be less surprised to read that he seemed to care little about his academic theological studies. This interpretation, of course, is still widespread, in spite of decades of theologically interested Kierkegaardians trying to persuade people otherwise. P. M. Mitchell’s influential mid-twentieth-century study of the history of Danish literature exemplifies the typical obscurity that surrounded Kierkegaard’s theological significance at the time: ‘After taking his degree at the University, he never made practical use of his academic training in theology.’4 This, of course, is simply not true, unless the ‘practical use’ of one’s theology degree were deemed to be limited either to an academic or ministerial post, neither of which Kierkegaard held. Kierkegaard, of course, used his theological training all the way through his works and his life, both in order to critique it and also as a seedbed for his own readings of the Christian tradition, upon which he made his staggering attacks upon the Church. Yet it would be an odd thing to see Søren Kierkegaard introduced in an academic work, for example, as a ‘Lutheran theologian’. It would be queried immediately. ‘Lutheran?’ Perhaps, but with some heavy footnotes. If calling Kierkegaard a ‘Lutheran theologian’ doesn’t quite seem right, then calling him a ‘nineteenth-century theologian’ seems even more out of kilter. For although he was certainly a child of that century in a literal sense, the character of his thought seems as if it belonged to another age entirely. This, of course, would be music to his ears, especially when one considers his critique of the times in which he lived.5 It is no coincidence, of course, that it took until the following century for his thought to fully emigrate beyond the splendid isolation of his Copenhagen context. Kierkegaard’s time as a theologian – or as a voice to the theologians – came very much in the next century, as he emerged as a kind of ‘companion’ to those who felt, in one way

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4 5

JP 5:5100, p. 39 / SKS 17, AA:12, p. 18. Augustus Young, The Secret Gloss: A Film Play on the Life and Work of Søren Kierkegaard (London: Elliott & Thompson, 2009), 63. P. M. Mitchell, A History of Danish Literature (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1957), 143. See, for example, TA.

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or another, that they could not do without him in the midst of the many storms of that troubled era. Due to his pervasive influence on so many thinkers6 – even among those who disagreed with him – we would not be overstating the case to name Kierkegaard amongst the most influential theological voices of the twentieth century. As for our present century, we can hardly claim the world is somehow less ‘troubled’, and therefore the need for Kierkegaard’s companionship and the pervasiveness of his theological influence remains as significant as it ever was. Being a ‘theological voice’ is one thing, of course, but the question remains whether we can call Kierkegaard a ‘theologian’. This would seem to require some even heavier footnotes. As Jacques Collette said in 1968, ‘Kierkegaard is neither Saint nor great theologian; he is not a doctor of the Church.’7 The academy seems to have reconciled itself with labelling Kierkegaard as, at best, an ‘occasional’ theologian, but predominantly as a thoroughgoing philosopher. (Of course, an average conversation with an analytic philosopher might confuse us further since some even doubt that Kierkegaard – nor any of his ‘continental’ companions – should even be called a ‘philosopher’ at all!) On all fronts Kierkegaard seems to be denied entry into the exclusivity of any particular school. The reality is, of course, that Kierkegaard resisted such classification for himself and would be heartily amused at the knots in which we tie ourselves trying to find a place for him. And to the theologians who know Kierkegaard a little better, all this fuss about who or what he is, or where he may or may not belong, seems deeply unsatisfying. It is also to miss the point of what he sought to do with his unique way of doing theology. Nonetheless, if the perception that Kierkegaard doesn’t do ‘proper’ theology contributes to an absence of theologians engaging with his work, then it is necessary for this to be counteracted. To that end, this volume is something of an experiment: What kind of a theologian can we make out of this perpetually perplexing fellow, Søren Kierkegaard? We know we’re not really allowed to systematize him, but we believe it is nonetheless possible to scope out and think through what he believed about the key doctrines of the Christian faith, even if he chose not to present his doctrinal assertions in systematic form. Another obvious barrier to reading Kierkegaard as a straightforward theologian is his use of pseudonyms for different texts.8 We have trouble enough getting to grips with any great theologian’s thought when they simply ‘author’ it, let alone when the theology is presented via a convoluted matrix of voices which may or may not reflect aspects of the portrayed ‘view’. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Kierkegaard’s first book was called The Concept of Irony (with Constant Reference to Socrates). Although Kierkegaard does not leave us completely in the dark over what he may or may not have been up to with his pseudonyms,9 he doesn’t make it easy for us. He remains, for many, the perpetual gadfly 6 7

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9

See Lee C. Barrett’s discussion of this in Chapter 9 of the present volume: ‘Kierkegaard’s Theological Legacy’. Jacques Collette, Kierkegaard: The Difficulty of Being Christian (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 24. Kierkegaard deliberately distanced himself from the authorship of certain texts, took on the role of pseudonymous ‘editor’ for other texts and employed a host of different multiple pseudonyms within others, under such names as Victor Eremita, Johannes de Silentio, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus and others. He did this all while simultaneously publishing works in his own name, sometimes on the very same day. This mode of writing (what he called the ‘left hand’ of the pseudonyms and the ‘right hand’ of his ‘edifying’ works) raises all sorts of questions about interpreting his work, though not necessarily to the extent we should be perpetually in the dark about what Kierkegaard’s edifying purposes were. For an excellent discussion on navigating this apparent interpretative complexity, see Mark A. Tietjen, Kierkegaard, Communication, and Virtue: Authorship as Edification (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). See PV. See also Chapter 2 by Kyle Roberts in the present volume.

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T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

in the ointment and has spawned hives of scholars endlessly debating with one another about which texts belong most appropriately to his own true tenor of thought. All the more reason, perhaps, to ignore Kierkegaard’s theology in favour of something less frustrating, more immediately ascertainable. To do so, of course, would be to miss out on something rather special in Kierkegaard’s work. To explain precisely what I mean by that would be to overstep the mark for an introduction, not least for an introduction to a volume which may or may not already overstep the mark by its very existence. To understand the heart of why Kierkegaard’s theology matters is to enter its strange world and to allow it to shape you. The chapters in this volume seek to provide a kind of gateway for this world.

KIERKEGAARD ON ACADEMIC THEOLOGY To enter this world via an ‘academic’ volume, of course, would seem to evoke yet another charge of Kierkegaardian inappropriateness. Kierkegaard, though well versed in the scholarship of his day, and a wonderfully complex thinker and writer in his own right, reserved some of his most scathing criticism for the world of academic theological scholarship: From generation to generation these hundreds and again hundreds of professors . . . They write books and then books about books, and books to give synopses of the books – periodicals arose merely to write about them, and book publishers flourish, and many, many thousands have jobs – – – and not a single one of these hired hands even remotely resembled in his life a truly Christian existence.10 Much like the pastors of Christendom, Kierkegaard saw the professors – indeed, the kinds of people contributing to this volume – as profiting from the doctrinal content of Christianity rather than being transformed by it; of creating and maintaining a genteel system of esoteric discourse which seemed to exist in and for its own relentless propagation. Furthermore, it was as a system which went about its important business with little reference to its inappropriateness in light of Christianity’s unrefined origins, such as Christ’s crucifixion; as Kierkegaard quips, The only thing lacking at Golgotha was a professor, who promptly would have appointed himself as professor – of theology? Well, we know that theology had not yet made its appearance at that time, and it would have been very obvious that if he were to become professor of anything it must be of this – that Christ was crucified. Consequently, professor of another person’s being put to death.11 No doubt Kierkegaard had a way of hyperbolizing when he most wanted to be heard. He surely did not think that all professors were de facto mercenaries. But he had a way of cutting right to the heart of a systematic issue and exposing what was missing in its entirety. Whether one professor was better than another, for Kierkegaard the bourgeois matrix of publications and self-promotion by which academia so efficiently maintains itself cannot merely run without reference to the bizarreness of the cross, which sits at the heart of all Christian theology, whether we try to avoid it or not.

10 11

JP 3:3568, pp. 637–8 / SKS 23, NB17:59, p. 200. JP 3:3571, p. 640 / SKS 23, NB18:72, p. 301.

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Kierkegaard did not make such startling criticisms against academic theology as a total outsider piously speaking of things of which he was technically ignorant. As noted, he was a graduate in theology, and one who easily had the ability to take up an academic position had he been so inclined. But in the theological world of his time he saw too much of a worldly mentality of theological evasiveness to be tempted by such a path. To Kierkegaard’s mind, these playground theologians were able to utilize their technical expertise to manipulate their way out of the most challenging imperatives of the Christian faith: ‘Christian scholarship is the human race’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the N.T., to ensure that one can continue to be a Christian without letting the N.T. come too close.’12 These are the kinds of comments which hang in the hearts of all so-called ‘Kierkegaard scholars’. How does one profess an expertise in the theological thought of a thinker who sees so fiercely through the shadiest motivations which haunt all our academic pursuits? Paul L. Holmer (1916–2004) was one Kierkegaard scholar who certainly seemed to imbibe the message of his would-be mentor when he diagnosed the problem of ‘The Academic Game’: ‘It appears that one has to go to university to become deeply uncertain on fundamentally important human matters. Knowledge is now the sesame to a kind of convictionless life.’13 A century after Kierkegaard, Holmer was noticing the end product of the passionless bureaucracy of perpetual doctrinal reformulation. It was not the ‘doctrine’ itself that was the problem, but the water in which it swam. This was – and is – the kind of atmosphere upon which the modern academy thrives, by which the worst imaginable evil is that an individual might wish to truly act upon what they profess to believe. The modern academic game engenders the proclivity to discuss ceaseless varieties and pluralities of ideas ‘without ever being possessed or transformed by any one of them’,14 leading only to perpetual absorption rather than ‘a demand for momentous choice’.15 Holmer, like Kierkegaard, knew that ideas ought to cost something, not least when they come with the kind of life-transformative significance that only a Messiah or an Apostle can generate. Theology is the very discipline that seeks to do business with the words and ideas which emanate from whoever God has shown himself to be. Hence, for Kierkegaard, the doing of this business ought to be done in a very self-aware and peculiar fashion, as one who carries a heightened awareness of that famously ‘infinite qualitative distinction’ between God and humanity. It is not as though Kierkegaard simply disliked categories or doctrines or logical formulations; it is that Kierkegaard wants us to act accordingly in light of what theology does to us. He sees beyond the mere form of doctrinal categories and asks us to follow their implications, wherever they might lead us, existentially, intellectually, devotionally and missionally.

THIS COMPANION Especially in the wake of two important Kierkegaard anniversaries in the last decade, contemporary Kierkegaard scholarship has been – however amusing this might seem to

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JP 3:2872, pp. 270–3. Paul L. Holmer, ‘The Academic Game and Its Logic’, in Thinking the Faith with Passion: Selected Essays, ed. David J. Gouwens and Lee C. Barrett III (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 123–39 [134]. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 137.

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T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

Kierkegaard himself – vastly productive. Indeed, a number of fine volumes published in recent years illuminate the broad range of Kierkegaard’s multifaceted and interdisciplinary thought in its philosophical, literary, religious and sociopolitical dimensions. Here, then, is the justification for yet another volume on Kierkegaard’s thought. In spite of the flourishing array of existing material, there is no multi-contributed work that attempts to account for Kierkegaard’s distinct theological approach, in both charted and uncharted territories. Given the astounding range of Kierkegaard’s thought, it is perhaps not surprising that the specifically theological elements of Kierkegaard’s literature have sometimes gone neglected. Indeed, as noted earlier, despite a unique legacy in the twentieth century, Kierkegaard is often overlooked among theologians for not being considered a ‘serious’ theological voice. This volume seeks to counter these misunderstandings by exploring – indeed, celebrating – the specifically theological dimensions of Kierkegaard’s thought and its ongoing significance for contemporary theology. It seeks to serve as a helpful guide to the study of Kierkegaard’s theology and as a catalyst for contemplating Kierkegaard’s continuing importance for the task and trajectories of theological work today. Because of the aforementioned complexity (impossibility?) of systematizing Kierkegaard’s thought, there is an intentional particularity to the chapters in the volume. Although these chapters have been envisioned, stewarded and edited, the aim has not been to make all chapters sound roughly the same, nor for them to speak in one particular guise or voice. As editors, David Gouwens and I have attempted to treat doctrinal loci in the kind of order relative to a usual systematic treatment – though the contributors have certainly made the chapters their own. The aim was for the contributors to bring out Kierkegaard’s distinctive treatment of a doctrine or theme in a way that is far more than a mere encyclopedic entry but not quite as unbounded as an idiosyncratic essay. Some contributors even draw from their personal experience and situation alongside the primary and secondary texts, and make interesting connections between his theology and other sources. This is entirely fitting for a theologian of Kierkegaard’s stripe, who cannot do theology without ‘constant reference’ to the one who does the doing. This does not, as might be suspected, lead to anthropocentrism, or an obsession with the momentary. Anyone who has read Kierkegaard’s discourses will see just how much he wants his dear listeners to lift up their gaze from the frenzy of cultural and societal idolatry to worship the eternal creator and redeemer.16 Consequently, this also ought to bear fruit in one’s divinely responsive love for his or her neighbour.17 While we must indeed remain aware of the dangers of ‘over-arranging’ Kierkegaard’s thought, we hope to have presented something of an overall picture of Kierkegaard’s theological outlook, historically, doctrinally and methodologically, including avenues where his thought might best serve as a resource for contemporary theological discussions. To this end, these chapters intend to assist readers in understanding salient dimensions and themes in Kierkegaard’s theology, bringing to light Kierkegaard’s own distinctive theological voice, as well as aiding the reader in seeing how Kierkegaard’s approach illumines and contributes to the contemporary theological task. As noted, given that this volume has been envisioned as less than an exhaustive encyclopedia but more than a loose collection of chapters, there has been a necessary balance between re-reading, retrieving and responding to Kierkegaard’s theology. This involves,

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See, for example, CD and EUD. See WL. See also Chapter 23 by Amy Laura Hall in the present volume.

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of course, some forays into things like reception history, interpretative tropes, contextual particularity and contemporary applications – but hopefully not in the mere sense of expanding the imperial borders of Kierkegaardian scholarship yet further and creating yet more ‘hundreds and again hundreds of professors’. It is truly hoped that the chapters together genuinely serve as a ‘companion’ that will be useful to anyone seeking to discover Kierkegaard’s distinctive theological wisdom and as a resource for applying Kierkegaard’s thought to his or her own theological endeavours. As a ‘companion’, of course, this volume aims to appeal to a wide audience, including Kierkegaard scholars, but also systematic and practical theologians, pastors, students and any informed general reader who seeks to grapple with Kierkegaard’s elusive theological matrix. With these goals in mind, we sought contributions from both established and emerging scholars, within and beyond the Kierkegaard ‘guild’, and representing a variety of theological perspectives to explore Kierkegaard’s theology. The volume does this in four main dimensions:

Part One: Preliminary Interpretative Issues Part One of the volume highlights key dynamics involved in approaching Kierkegaard’s complex corpus, including chapters on Kierkegaard’s approaches to communication (Roberts, Chapter 2), language (Zachman, Chapter 3), doctrine (Barrett, Chapter 4) and the church (Kirkpatrick, Chapter 5). These foundational chapters wrestle with some of the key reasons for Kierkegaard’s aforementioned awkwardness within theological reception. Overall, this section serves as an important compass for how theologians might best approach Kierkegaard, bearing in mind the distinctive ways in which he went about the theological task.

Part Two: Kierkegaard’s Theological Biography Part Two aims to explore the historical and biographical context of Kierkegaard’s theological development, offering something of Kierkegaard’s theological ‘story’. This will include his time as a student of theology in Copenhagen and Berlin (Pattison, Chapter 6), noting the theologians who influenced him and against whom he was reacting. Further chapters explore Kierkegaard’s approach to biblical exegesis (Rasmussen, Chapter 7), his wrestling over his would-be vocation as a preacher (Edwards, Chapter 8) and his subsequent theological influence both in his own time and in the twentieth- and early twentyfirst centuries (Barrett, Chapter 9).

Part Three: Key Doctrinal Themes Part Three offers, for the first time in a single volume, focused expositions of Kierkegaard’s critical and creative rethinking of particular doctrines (both those familiar and unfamiliar), emphasizing how Kierkegaard expressed and understood them, and how his unique approach to each theme might today illumine its use in expected or unexpected ways. Chapters in this section include discussion of doctrinal themes for which Kierkegaard is already well known, such as sin (Mahn), Christology (Walsh) and faith (Wilson and Evans), as well as themes for which many know very little of his thinking, such as creation (Torrance), pneumatology (Rae) or eschatology (Burgess), many of which break exciting new ground. Overall, then, this section serves as a demonstrative guide to understanding Kierkegaard’s essential doctrinal orthodoxy while simultaneously illuminating his essential doctrinal creativity.

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T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

Part Four: Theological Trajectories Part Four will conclude the volume by exploring some recent Kierkegaardian trajectories, beyond his own work and into our own time, for constructive theological reflection. Here we ask what are the aims and goals of theological study and theological confession for this world, and how can Kierkegaard help illumine the theological task in the midst of it? Topics in this part include reflections on theology and contemporary academia (Hauerwas, Chapter 25), theology and the information society (Brock, Chapter 26), theology and literary media (Ziolkowski, Chapter 27) and theology in a ‘post-Christendom’ age (Westphal, Chapter 28). These chapters have sought to think through and beyond Kierkegaard’s theology in order to put him to use for addressing the issues of theology in our own time.

ON APPROPRIATE INAPPROPRIATENESS To return to the question at the beginning, then, Would Kierkegaard approve of our Companion, filled as it is with many words from these many scholars of Kierkegaardian theology? Perhaps this is the wrong question to ask. If we are going to redeem something from what the academic task still has to offer today, then the fruitful endeavour to explicate, to analyse, to evaluate, to construct, all remain before us. Kierkegaard does not will us towards obscurantism, even though he remains essentially suspicious of all we might do (or not do) with our scholarship. He wishes only that if we are going to write and read scholarly books about thinkers like himself, then we must remain aware of the perennial oddness of doing Christian theology as we do it. For all the brilliance of his own theological work – as this volume aims to show – Kierkegaard would warn all Christian theologians that however sophisticated and/or recognizable we wish to become, we remain nothing more than ‘professors of another person’s being put to death’.

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PART ONE

Preliminary Interpretative Issues

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CHAPTER TWO

Kierkegaard on Communication: Refusing to ‘Piddle’ KYLE ROBERTS

INTRODUCTION Kierkegaard was fascinated with the problem of communication (Meddelelse), especially how authors communicate with their readers. Depending on one’s perspective, his interest in this subject is either a rich irony or a simple explanation for his complicated authorship and extensive corpus. On the one hand, his interest in communication appears ironic because, for someone so apparently attuned to the dynamics of communication, Kierkegaard is notoriously difficult to understand. On the other hand, according to the aforementioned ‘simple explanation’, Kierkegaard’s authorship stands as a masterful, performative demonstration of the complexities involved in communication – especially when the purpose of communication is not simply to convey information, but to instigate or effect inward transformation towards a more ethically and religiously serious life. To communicate ideas at the objective level (e.g. conveying information about matters of fact) is one thing; to do so on the subjective level (e.g. conveying ethical and religious capacities) is quite another. It is especially problematic when the goal of communication is to effect change in subjects who do not or cannot see that they need it. How can one communicate truth of existential, or subjective, importance to people who live under illusions about their ethical and religious state of being? In this way, his writings can be viewed as an elaborate strategy to overcome the problem of communication, in particular the problem of communicating ethically and religiously significant ideas such that they result in a personal transformation – or at minimum a new awareness – in the reader. This concern in Kierkegaard’s approach to the dynamics of communication gets at the heart of a central interpretative question in Kierkegaard studies: whether, and if so in what sense, Kierkegaard is a theological communicator? For those of us who want to understand Kierkegaard, the success of his demonstration may be small consolation. We might prefer he made the task a bit easier. But he did not. He made it harder; that was his style and that was his purpose. Understanding Kierkegaard’s contributions to theology requires that we face this problem of communication. What was Kierkegaard really saying? What did he

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really want? Who is this ‘Kierkegaard’, anyway? For some readers, Kierkegaard is a Christian philosopher with an overarching goal, to ‘introduce Christianity again – into Christendom’,1 and a finely tuned communicative strategy in the service of that goal. For others, he is a communicator of a different kind, a playfully imaginative ironist who disavowed Christianity and reveled in the indeterminacy of texts, all the while chuckling at those who take him too seriously. I count myself among the first group: the thematic coherence connecting the diverse strands of Kierkegaard’s authorship legitimates his own direct assessment, even if only from the advantage of a retrospective glance. Despite the diversity of authorial voices and styles, he was a ‘religious author’ from beginning to end, and the complex, diverse strands of his authorship are at least partly tied together by a particular religious goal.2 By examining a key concept in Kierkegaard’s discussion of communication, ‘appropriation’ (Tilegnelse), I will show why the first reading is best able to account for what Kierkegaard is doing in his texts and is most able to link his discussions of communication with consistent themes stretching across his diverse corpus.3 I will now turn to each of these two interpretative options in more detail. I will examine the first option in Sections I and II, arguing that Kierkegaard is a ‘man with a plan’ as an edifying, Christian author, who also rises to the challenge of ‘communication’ to a religiously deluded audience by means of his concept of ‘indirect communication’. In Section III I will look more closely at the second option, Kierkegaard as ‘masked man’, the poetically playful imaginative ironist who disavowed Christianity and reveled in the indeterminacy of texts, but nonetheless is still in a different sense a theological ‘indirect’ communicator. Learning from the insights of each of these two options, in Section IV I will explore in more depth my own constructive proposal, focusing on Kierkegaard as an edifying, Christian author, whose goals in communication are best illuminated by his key concept of ‘appropriation’. I will then expand on Kierkegaard’s understanding of communication aimed at ‘appropriation’ turning in Section V to his important unpublished Lectures on Communication. Finally, in Section VI I will examine Kierkegaard’s understanding of the ‘theological self ’ and the Bible as communication.

I. A MAN WITH A PLAN: THE EDIFYING, CHRISTIAN, NON-PIDDLING KIERKEGAARD This first interpretative option presumes that Kierkegaard was primarily a religious author and a Christian thinker whose complicated authorship is best approached via the hermeneutical key that Kierkegaard offered his readers in On My Work as an Author, published in 1851, and in a lengthier edition written earlier but only published in 1859, four years after his death, under the title, The Point of View for My Work as an Author.4 There Kierkegaard offers an explanation for the literary diversity but thematic coherence of his authorship, a diversity and coherence reflected in the conjunction of both pseudonymous (indirect) and ‘signed’ (direct) authorship:

1 2 3 4

PV, 42. PV, 23. I define ‘appropriation’ later in this chapter. See the ‘Historical Introduction’ in PV, xviii–xix.

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13

I am and was a religious author, that my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian, with direct and indirect polemical aim at that enormous illusion, Christendom.5 He spotlighted the complex diversity in his corpus in 1846, two years prior to authoring The Point of View, when, in an appendix to Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard asserted that the ‘polyonymity’ of his authorship could not be explained by reference to an ‘accidental basis in his person’ but rather has an ‘essential basis in the production’ of the corpus.6 In other words, the pseudonymity transcends anything related to the empirical person, Kierkegaard, and is integral to understanding the meaning of the works individually and as a whole. For Kierkegaard, this polyonymity, or multiplicity, of perspectives reflected throughout the scope of his authorship represents not only a diversity of points of view from the various spheres of life (i.e. aesthetic, ethical, religious) but also the more fundamental employment of both indirect and direct communication. The pseudonyms constitute indirect communication (not necessarily Kierkegaard’s own voice or perspective, as such) whereas the ‘signed’ works count as Kierkegaard’s direct communication to his readers, his earnest whisperings to that single individual whom he envisions to be on the receiving end of his communicative action (i.e. the directly communicated discourse). Kierkegaard scholars increasingly argue that such clean, neat distinctions between pseudonymous and signed texts, as reflecting indirect and direct communication, respectively, do not quite hold up to scrutiny. M. Jamie Ferreria points out that newly published translations of Kierkegaard writings reveal an experimental, improvisational Kierkegaard, wavering about whether he should sign his name to an essay or use a pseudonym and often changing his mind – in one case at the last minute before publication.7 Such indecisiveness suggests playfulness and spontaneity more than calculated, targeted precision. This modus operandi should impact the reader’s approach to his diverse authorship; once readers understand that Kierkegaard was more improvisational and playful than The Point of View suggests, they may not feel duty-bound to follow Kierkegaard’s prescribed hermeneutical guide. Nonetheless, these nuances can be incorporated into the assumption that Kierkegaard’s claims about his authorship should be taken (at least, in the main) straightforwardly and should generally guide the reader’s approach to Kierkegaard’s writings. While Kierkegaard had a sense of his own vocation as a religious author and of his strategic intentions from the beginning, his strongest ascriptions of thematic coherence came later, when he viewed the authorship as cohering thematically, in large part due to his assumption that his authorship bore the imprint of divine guidance. Kierkegaard could speak both from a burgeoning and incomplete self-understanding of his authorial project ‘from the beginning,’ and with a fuller, ‘retrospective’ understanding at a later stage. As David Law convincingly argues, Kierkegaard’s self-understanding of his authorship – as articulated in The Point of View (written in 1848), reflects his attempt to ‘work out the meaning of his authorship’ up to that point.8 Its fragmentary and sometimes inconsistent

5

6 7 8

PV, 23. On the differences between The Point of View for My Work as an Author in relation to the later On My Work as an Author, see David R. Law, ‘A Cacophony of Voices: The Multiple Authors and Readers of Kierkegaard’s The Point of View for My Work as an Author’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Point of View, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010), 12–47. CUP, 625. M. Jamie Ferreira, Kierkegaard (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 8. Law, ‘A Cacophony of Voices’, 14.

14

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T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

nature reflects Kierkegaard’s attempt to ‘achieve clarity with regard to himself, his remarkable literary productivity, its relation to Christianity, and its role in witnessing to the Christian Gospel in an age in which Christianity was no longer taken seriously’.9 He would arrive at a more fully formed retrospective understanding in 1851, as reflected in the more concise and unambiguous On My Work as an Author. Kierkegaard’s assessment of his religious purpose and the consistency of religious and Christian themes is justified by close examination of his authorship, including both ‘religious’ and ‘aesthetic’ works. This is true even when we take into account the more fragmentary earlier self-assessment of his authorship, with its multiplicity or ‘cacophony’ of authorial voices.10 Kierkegaard’s self-proclaimed hermeneutical key to his authorship was accompanied by particular theological convictions – one of which was an assumption that divine providence was at work in his life and vocation as a religious author. In Kierkegaard’s own assessment, however grandiose it might seem to the modern reader, he perceived – in retrospect – the mark of divine providence on his writing: If I were now to state as categorically definitely as possible Governance’s part in the whole work as an author, I know of no expression more descriptive or more decisive than this: It is Governance that has brought me up, and the upbringing is reflected in the writing process.11 In a journal entry he writes, ‘I am deeply convinced that there is another integral coherence, that there is a comprehensiveness in the whole production (especially through the assistance of Governance).’12 Kierkegaard claims to discern a deeply religious sensibility and theological coherence across the diverse spectrum of his authorship. While Kierkegaard’s genius, like the authorship itself, cannot or should not be reduced to any single thematic point, he offers up an obvious candidate for identifying the source of the ‘comprehensiveness’. Kierkegaard’s stated, overarching concern is to ‘introduce Christianity again – into Christendom’;13 to clarify the nature of New Testament Christianity and to hold up that ideal against nineteenth-century Danish life, a context in which (according to Kierkegaard’s assessment) ethical and religious seriousness had been reduced to lackadaisical, self-serving indulgence in God’s forgiving grace. Kierkegaard presented himself as a Socratic gadfly and a poetic prophet, speaking into the malaise of Christendom and urging serious, critical, self-reflection. Do their lives testify to what they believe? Does the Christianity they proclaim come anywhere close to the Christianity ideally portrayed in the New Testament? In the end, we must reckon with Kierkegaard’s self-perception that he was a religious and Christian author whose motivations are intensely religious and theological: ‘The whole of my authorship relates itself to Christianity.’14

9 10 11

12 13 14

Ibid., 14–15. Law, ‘A Cacophony of Voices’, 45–6. PV, 77. Kierkegaard confidently remarks, ‘On the whole the very mark of my genius is that Governance broadens and radicalizes whatever concerns me personally.’ PV, 189. JP 6:6346, pp. 117–18 / SKS 25, NB10:38, p. 333. PV, 42. PV, 23.

15

KIERKEGAARD ON COMMUNICATION

15

II. ON THE CHALLENGE OF COMMUNICATING RELIGIOUS TRUTH TO THE RELIGIOUSLY DELUDED Although Kierkegaard described himself as a Christian author with religious objectives, he attempted to fend off charges of hypocrisy that would inevitably follow that selfdescription – especially given the stringency of his prophetic critique. In a journal entry, he writes, The category for my undertaking is: to make persons aware of the essentially Christian, but this accounts for the repeated statement: I am not that, for otherwise there is confusion. My task is to get persons deceived – within the meaning of truth – into religious commitment, which they have cast off, but I do not have authority; instead of authority I use the very opposite, I say: the whole undertaking is for my own discipline and education.15 Associating himself (the empirical, historical Kierkegaard) too closely to the incisive aspects of his message would have surely undercut its intended force. So, he wrote as one ‘without authority’, he labelled his most explicitly religious and direct writings ‘discourses’ rather than sermons16 and he included himself in the intended audience of that message. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard acknowledged that the success of his communication required the employment of a kind of teleological deceit. Kierkegaard’s communication style was motivated, he claims, by the recognition that direct communication to a deluded person about his or her deluded state is ineffectual. One must confront self-deception with yet another deception, in order to get people to realize and reckon with their illusions. As he puts it, ‘My task is to get persons deceived – within the meaning of truth – into religious commitment.’17 Communicating directly and rationally to schizophrenic persons about their state of mind will not likely help them come to grips with their psychosis. For Kierkegaard, the same principle holds true of those who are deluded about their religious state of being. More broadly still, there is no ‘objective’ path from non-faith to faith, which is why direct communication of the deepest, existential truth of Christianity will not effectively move the recipient of that communication into faith.18 Indirect communication of subjectively oriented truth seems preferable to direct preaching or rationalist apologetics, neither of which can directly lead someone from unbelief to faith apart from a spiritually transformative, divine intervention. Such direct communication efforts will likely only solidify the recipient’s self-deception. Kierkegaard’s corpus, if we take The Point of View at face value, was a hermeneutically sophisticated attempt to edify his readers by re-establishing a correct use and understanding of the language of Christianity. His criticisms of Christendom stemmed in large part from what he perceived as a ‘volatilization’ of Christian concepts. In one of his early ‘Faustian letters’, Kierkegaard writes, And now Christianity – how has it been treated? I share entirely your disapproval of the way every Christian concept has become so volatilized, so completely dissolved in

15 16

17 18

JP 6:6533, p. 252 / SKS 22, NB14:31, p. 362. He writes, ‘A sermon presupposes a pastor (ordination); a Christian discourse can be by a layman.’ JP 1:638, p. 262 / SKS 20, NB:120, p. 179. JP 6:6533, p. 252 / SKS 22, NB14:31, p. 362. See also M. Holmes Hartshorne, Kierkegaard, Godly Deceiver: The Nature and Meaning of His Pseudonymous Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 13–14.

16

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T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

a mass of fog that it is beyond all recognition. To the concepts of faith, incarnation, tradition, inspiration, which in the Christian sphere are to lead to a particular fact, the philosophers choose to give an entirely different meaning . . . And I still have not mentioned the concept that has not only been volatilized, like the others, but even profaned: the concept of redemption.19 There is not sufficient space in this chapter to unpack each of these theological themes and explore the ways in which Kierkegaard might have seen these theological concepts ‘volatilized’ or ‘profaned’ or ‘completely dissolved’. But it is clear that, for Kierkegaard, to deal with the problem of Christendom required taking on the problem of religious language and its employment in language and in life, which meant that the problem of communication itself was brought to the fore. Communication had to be strategically and cunningly employed to penetrate the fog of hypocrisy, materialism and nationalism that led to an ethically and religiously relaxed environment, such that Danish citizenship and nationalist identity were conflated with Christianity. Kierkegaard’s goal to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom provides coherence to his authorial project. He retrospectively viewed the coinciding of aesthetic, pseudonymous (‘indirect’) works with his signed, religious (‘direct’) writings as evidence of both the coherence and the intentionality of his vocation as a religious author, as well as indication (in his retrospective assessment) that divine providence had guided his authorship with an overarching purpose in view.20 Kierkegaard’s authorial purposes culminate in his direct ‘attack upon Christendom’,21 and in particular Christendom’s conflation of Danish national and cultural identity with Christianity; he targeted his polemical arrows towards vocational Christians (the priests and professors of Christendom) who should have known better. On the whole, Kierkegaard’s communicative action involved injecting central theological concepts of Christianity (e.g. sin, atonement, salvation) with existential rigour through the diversity and imaginative playfulness of communication, thereby rescuing those concepts from the speculative and deflating influence of Danish Hegelian theologians. By deceiving the deceived, Kierkegaard intended to lead his readers into a recognition that their lives did not match up to the rigorous standards of New Testament Christianity. This realization, in turn, would (theoretically) issue forth in acts of repentance or, at the least, the honest recognition of failing to reach the ideal. The unmasking of delusions would enable a renewed appropriation of those basic Christian, theological concepts, which would initiate their being put into action in life, or reduplicated. Kierkegaard’s authorship, then, as an extensive and elaborate communication project, was a sustained attempt to edify his readers by exposing their delusions and opening them up to a better understanding of the Gospel and of what Christian discipleship entails. This traditional perspective is reflected in Kierkegaard’s own words in the following journal entry:

19 20

JP 5:5181, pp. 81–2 / SKS 17, CC:12, p. 201. As Kierkegaard writes in On My Work as an Author, The directly religious was present from the very beginning. Two Upbuilding Discourses (1843) are in fact concurrent with Either/Or. And in order to safeguard the concurrence of the directly religious, every pseudonymous work was accompanied concurrently by a little collection of ‘upbuilding discourses’ until Concluding Unscientific Postscript appeared, which poses the issue . . . of the whole authorship: ‘becoming a Christian.’ OMWA, 7–8.

21

See Kierkegaard’s ‘The Moment’ and Late Writings.

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KIERKEGAARD ON COMMUNICATION

17

Christianity tends above all toward actuality, toward being made actuality, the only medium to which it is truly related. It is not to be possessed in any way other than by being made actual; it is not communicated except to or in upbuilding and awakening. It must always be assumed that there are some who do not have it or who are still lagging far behind – therefore there must be labor on their behalf. But Christianity dare not be communicated in the medium of tranquility (less so because one who does this ventures to affirm that now all are Christians). Therefore, Christianly understood, the artistic, the poetic, the speculative, the scientific, the pedagogical are sin – how do I dare give myself the tranquility to sit this way and piddle with it!22 The Kierkegaard articulated in this entry is an earnest, religious and Christian author who refuses to ‘piddle’ via the medium of tranquility, who sees aesthetic endeavours as lacking the religious earnestness required by the situation and as lacking the rigour called for by the New Testament. He is after religious awakening. This perspective on Kierkegaard’s authorship is grounded by his own stated refusal to communicate in any way that would undermine that awakening, or edification. This traditional perspective is emphatically articulated by M. Holmes Hartshorne, who, in Kierkegaard, Godly Deceiver, argues that we should take Kierkegaard at his word when he makes assertions about the meaning of his authorship and the function of each of his texts within an overall, intentional and possibly even providentially guided framework. Hartshorne asserts that ‘the necessary starting point for any study of Kierkegaard is the recognition that he considered his entire literary activity to be a religious task’.23 Hartshorne goes on to elaborate the role of Kierkegaard’s distinctive, pseudonymous works, on the basis of the hermeneutical guide offered in The Point of View. In retrospect, and especially in the light of the more playful and extemporaneous approach of Kierkegaard to his pseudonymous masks, Hartshorne’s reading may be too stark; the interpretative usefulness of the categories of aesthetic, ethical and religious, and the interpretative usefulness of the distinction between indirect/direct communication, is underdetermined by blurry lines across the texts themselves and also by the (aforementioned) authorial spontaneity. Nonetheless, the blurriness of the lines strengthens, rather than undercuts, Kierkegaard’s religious and Christian orientation. The pseudonymous, indirect works consistently express Kierkegaard’s concern with religious and Christian themes. More recently, this perspective is presented with more restraint by C. Stephen Evans in Kierkegaard: An Introduction.24 Evans summarizes Kierkegaard’s complicated authorship and concludes that Kierkegaard should be taken at his word in The Point of View and that his authorship can (and should) legitimately be read through the hermeneutical lens Kierkegaard offers. When Kierkegaard asserts that ‘my whole authorship pertains to Christianity’,25 Evans believes that ‘these claims are essentially correct, and that Kierkegaard was right to say that’ the ‘totality’ of his authorship is ‘religious from first to last’, which is ‘something anyone who can see, if he wants to see, must also [be able to] see’.26

22 23 24 25 26

JP 1:508, p. 203 / SKS 22, NB12:18, p. 154. Hartshorne, Godly Deceiver, 13. C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 11–16. PV, 23. Evans, Kierkegaard, 12. The Kierkegaard quote is from OMWA, 6.

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T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

Similarly, Murray Rae insists, ‘For Kierkegaard, theology is the main thing. Kierkegaard was, above all, a Christian thinker, and to think Christianly is precisely to do theology, to consider all questions of human life, that is, in light of the Truth that is disclosed in Christ.’27 For Rae, reading Kierkegaard profitably and responsibly begins with a recognition of Kierkegaard’s own stated authorial aim: ‘We conform much better to his own intentions if the reading of his work becomes an aid to devotion, to “upbuilding” and to discipleship.’28 Mark Tietjen has also recently argued that Kierkegaard should be taken at his word and should be read as a Christian author whose aim is the edification of his readers.29 Tietjen proposes that Kierkegaard stands in the tradition of virtue ethics, given that the overall goal of Kierkegaard’s authorship is moral and religious edification. It would be strange, Tietjen argues, to undercut the ethical and religious seriousness of Kierkegaard’s authorial project by reading Kierkegaard as a hermeneutical nihilist or ironic indeterminist. Criticizing the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ found in authors Henning Fenger and Joakim Garff, Tietjen advocates a ‘hermeneutic of trust’ in reading Kierkegaard’s authorship and that we therefore trust ‘Kierkegaard’s retrospective literature’ (i.e. The Point of View) as a guide for understanding his corpus and his individual texts.30 Tietjen makes the interesting claim that Kierkegaard’s ‘Christian maieutic method’ required the cultivation of virtue for the communicator, too, in order to adequately convey the intended message. Tietjen appeals to the apparent earnestness of Kierkegaard, as expressed in his reflections on his authorship and in his suppositions about the role of divine governance in making that project cohere, such that it could be an effective medium for communicating ethical and religious truth for the end goal of appropriation by the reader.31 He summarizes, ‘To make mockery of these claims is to miss Kierkegaard’s valuation of virtues like humility, obedience, submission, and openness to the work of God.’32 While this interpretation of Kierkegaard has enjoyed high stature in recent decades, other scholars have discovered a different Kierkegaard. This is due in part to increasing sensitivity to Kierkegaard’s own recognition of the ambiguities inherent in language and to a new hermeneutical weight given to the creative playfulness of Kierkegaard’s many ‘masks’.33 For those turning in this direction, Kierkegaard is less a religious author and a Christian thinker and more an ironist and a precursor of postmodern sensibilities regarding the indeterminacy of texts and a diminishing role for the author’s purposes in guiding interpretation.

27 28 29

30

31

32 33

Murray Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 1. Ibid., 4. Mark A. Tietjen, Kierkegaard, Communication, and Virtue: Authorship as Edification (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). See, for example, Henning Fenger, Kierkegaard, the Myths, and Their Origins, trans. George C. Schoolfield (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980) and Joakim Garff, ‘ “The Eyes of Argus”: The Point of View and Points of View on Kierkegaard’s Work as an Author ’, in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, ed. Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain, trans. Stacey Ake (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 75–102. Tietjen effectively argues that ‘Kierkegaard’s goal is for the audience to appropriate the beliefs they already claim to hold’ (Tietjen, Kierkegaard, Communication, and Virtue, 77). Ibid., 79. See Louis Mackey, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986), 187–90.

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KIERKEGAARD ON COMMUNICATION

19

III. THE MASKED MAN: THE POETICALLY PLAYFUL (AND ‘PIDDLING’?) KIERKEGAARD For this second interpretative approach to Kierkegaard’s literature and what it might mean for ‘communication’, a striking feature of his reflections on his authorship is that he refused to assert authority as a religious author. Some scholars argue that this refusal to assert authority and his reticence to claim to be a Christian goes hand-in-hand with Kierkegaard’s appreciation for irony.34 Kierkegaard recognizes that there really is no final ‘authority’ of a text and he appropriately released any hold on them, thereby affirming the basically indeterminate nature of interpretation. Kierkegaard’s supposedly direct communication ends up being just as indirect as his pseudonymous literature. Following this trajectory through means that Kierkegaard’s Christian, religious and ‘direct’ writings are not really different in kind from his aesthetical, philosophical and ‘indirect’ writings. His emphatic proclamations to be a religious author, or even a Christian, are undone by his own admission that he lacks ecclesial authority, by his reticence to claim to be a Christian and by the poetic and playful tone of so much of his writings. An early, influential proponent of this perspective is Louis Mackey, who views Kierkegaard’s writings as irreducibly ironic and as best described through a succession of diverse perspectives, no one of which has hermeneutical priority over the other. The end result, for Mackey, is that there is no comprehensive thread to Kierkegaard’s authorship; Kierkegaard’s corpus – if there can be said to be a ‘corpus’ at all – precludes thematic cohesion. Kierkegaard is the ultimate ironist; all of his communication is inescapably indirect. Evans summarizes, Mackey did not merely question whether Kierkegaard’s own account of the ‘point of view’ for interpreting his authorship was correct, but argued that no such point of view, whether Kierkegaard’s or anyone else’s, could be correct. (Mackey, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard). Mackey affirms that there is no underlying unity to Kierkegaard’s authorship, only ‘points of view’. Even the ‘Søren Kierkegaard’ who affixed his name to the non-pseudonymous books is ultimately just another pseudonym, a character Kierkegaard invented. (see Mackey, 187–90)35 Furthermore, for Mackey, there appears no obvious reason to privilege Kierkegaard as religious author over Kierkegaard as aesthetic author. The symmetry reflected by the two types across his authorship (the ‘duplicity’ of the religious/aesthetic works) suggests that one cannot take interpretative priority over the other, despite Kierkegaard’s own claims to the contrary.36 Kierkegaard’s consistently dialectical mode (replete with ‘ambiguity or duplicity’) belies and undercuts his insistence that the question raised by the apparent 34

35 36

Along with Mackey, see also Fenger, Kierkegaard, the Myths, and Their Origins; Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993); and Peter Fenves, ‘Chatter’: Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). Evans, Kierkegaard, 12. Mackey writes, One might wonder: since the two series of works – pseudonymous and edifying – are almost perfectly parallel (for every aesthetic book a religious book and vice versa), why is this argument not perfectly symmetrical? Why doesn’t the hypothesis that Kierkegaard is a religious writer fail when it meets Either/Or – supposing some serious reader to have opened Two Edifying Discourses first? Why isn’t the assumption that he is an aesthetic writer the one that succeeds, the one presupposition that explains the authorship as a whole? Mackey, Points of View, 166.

20

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T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

ambiguity of his texts is answered by the overarching theme and by his stated authorial goal.37 Mackey concludes that, [Kierkegaard] has outsmarted himself. The position he wanted earnestly and securely to occupy has been sabotaged by the methods he used to take it. The dialectic eats everything it throws up, and the mystifier becomes a mystery to himself . . . Reflection divides but does not conquer: there is no such thing as ‘the corpus as a whole’. The writings cannot constitute a totality . . . Irony, which undercuts every point of view, is the point of view from which all the works are written.38 Mackey, drawing on Henning Fenger, argues that the final picture of Kierkegaard which emerges is that of a play-actor, with a ‘profusion of roles’ having ‘countless versions’; a ‘poet who, as actor and prompter, every moment becomes so intensely a part of his role that he believes in it and in himself ’.39 He is a playful poet who relinquishes control over the message of his texts. We are left with texts whose meaning cannot be determined with reference to an author (or certainly not to that author’s own hermeneutical guide of his work, since the author himself is likely deceived or mistaken); instead, we are free to play with the texts, or perhaps for them to play with us. But what, then, of writing and reading as a form of communication? Does it not become a frivolous exercise, lacking earnestness and devoid of any criteria for determining whether communication has actually occurred? And what of edification? As another author puts it (approvingly), everything becomes ‘chatter’ and the author fades from meaningful consideration in the engagement with the text; it would appear to be impossible to judge whether the communication given through the text has been effectively conveyed.40 What criterion would one possibly use to make such a judgement? Steven Shakespeare’s Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God attempts to steer something of a path between, on the one hand, the perspective on Kierkegaard which takes him at his word and, on the other hand, more self-consciously postmodern readings, such as that of Mackey or, a scholar Shakespeare cites, Peter Fenves.41 For Shakespeare, none of Kierkegaard’s writings are truly direct; all of them evidence Kierkegaard’s foundational belief that language, while not the origin of sin, presupposes it. Language, a product of creation, is finite and unable to transcend its inherent limitations. Communication, then, whether referencing the physical or the metaphysical, creation or divinity, or whether pertaining to objectivity or subjectivity, remains fleeting, fragmented and indirect. For Shakespeare, this reveals why, for Kierkegaard, the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is difficult to sustain and, when transcendent ‘objects’ of linguistic reference, such as God, enter the picture, any presumed demarcation between subjectivity and objectivity cannot bear the weight of the pressure; the distinction is undone by an ‘unbearable tension’.42 For Shakespeare, Kierkegaard’s view of the inescapable indirectness of language, particularly in the face of the daunting question of the existence and reality of God, precludes Kierkegaard from making the epistemological leap into ‘religious 37

38 39 40 41 42

Mackey writes, ‘He is so perfectly dialectical – so wholly bereft by reflection of the last (or even the first) traces of his immediacy – that the “ambiguity or duplicity” in his authorship remains in spite of everything he says by way of clarification. Perfectly reflective is perfectly undecided.’ Ibid., 183. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 187. Mackey cites Henning Fenger, Kierkegaard, the Myths and Their Origins, 147, 214. Fenves, ‘Chatter’. Steven Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 223. Ibid., 24, 27.

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realism’; he must be contented with a metaphysical anti-realism, though maintaining a pragmatic ‘ethical realism’. While Shakespeare insists that his interpretation differs from that of other interpreters such as Peter Fenves (and does not collapse into hermeneutical ‘undecidability’),43 he finds in Kierkegaard a precursor to Derridean post-structuralism and suggests that Kierkegaard’s orthodox Christology prevents him from being as hermeneutically consistently postmodern as he could (and should) otherwise have been.44 In a more recent work, Shakespeare extends this argument further to suggest that Kierkegaard’s ontology does not sustain a distinction between transcendence and immanence; the centrality of the paradox, in particular of Christ as the ‘absolute paradox’, in Kierkegaard does not depend upon an orthodox doctrine of Christ being both divine (in the traditional, ‘transcendent’ sense of divinity as personal God beyond creation) and human. Instead, Shakespeare argues that, insofar as the ‘otherworldly transcendent’ plays a role in Kierkegaard’s writings, it is as ‘something to be resisted and refused’.45 Shakespeare sees the logic of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on subjectivity, appropriation and the single individual as rejecting a view of transcendence which would undermine the inherent significance of material creation – thus transcendence plays a role, for Kierkegaard, within the frame of immanent creation, but only as affirming finite existence, not as pointing towards some otherworldly reality. The indirectness of Kierkegaard’s communicative approach is a clue, Shakespeare argues, to Kierkegaard’s refusal of transcendence and his privileging of immanence in his ontological framework. Because there is no way to escape the limits and boundaries of finitude in order to grasp an ‘infinite’ and ‘eternal’ transcendent (i.e. God), everything takes the mode of indirection which, for Shakespeare, means everything – including transcendence – is wrapped up in immanence. This move to rethink transcendence in this way (and to read Kierkegaard as doing that) results in the conclusion that theological concepts function for Kierkegaard as linguistic instruments for activating or inspiring passion and ethical earnestness, or what Shakespeare calls an ‘ethics of immanence’.46 Shakespeare’s work represents an intricately thoughtful and deep engagement with Kierkegaard’s texts. He attempts to distinguish his view from postmodern readings that emphasize the thoroughgoing irony and indirection to the point of rejecting any possibility of determinate interpretations of Kierkegaard. Nonetheless, Shakespeare finally leans to the side of indeterminacy; Kierkegaard’s explicitly Christian, theological motivations are treated as hurdles to overcome, and the transcendent aspects of Kierkegaard’s theology are collapsed into an immanent frame. Kierkegaard’s authorship, and his view of Christian language, is indeed linked to Christian theology, but in a different way than Shakespeare argues. Nonetheless, Shakespeare rightly recognizes an insight which should be accounted for in any discussion of Kierkegaard’s view of communication. For Kierkegaard, religious existence and a consistently serious ethical life can only finally be lived in the context of a relationship to God, which itself is made possible only through the incarnation of the God-man.47 Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christianity includes at its core the notion of divine revelation as the communication which facilitates the task of becoming a self. Divine revelation,

43 44 45 46 47

Ibid., 222. Ibid., 238. Steven Shakespeare, Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 13. Ibid., 43. Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God, 225–6.

22

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in Kierkegaard’s view, is an instance of transcendence breaking through the boundaries of finitude, disrupting immanence in order to transform it from within. Revelation amounts to a kind of transcendent communication, but one which requires subjectivity and appropriation in order to be deemed a completed communicative action. Kierkegaard’s view of religious language is shaped by his conviction that God reveals truth to humanity and that this truth can be appropriated only through receptivity of the divine gift of revelation; this gift makes religiously and existentially significant communication possible. In this regard, Steven Emmanuel is correct when he identifies Kierkegaard as maintaining a theology of communication which incorporates an acknowledgement of divine presence. As he puts it, ‘Kierkegaard’s understanding of what language is and how it functions is underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.’48 Kierkegaard’s theological belief in the concept of divine revelation is apparent throughout his writings and should shape our appreciation of Kierkegaard’s own assessment of his project – and of his view of communication in general.

IV. RELIGIOUS COMMUNICATION AIMS FOR APPROPRIATION Central to Kierkegaard’s understanding of communication in light of divine revelation is the concept of ‘appropriation’ (Tilegnelse). For Kierkegaard, divine revelation mediates human transformation; revelation creates an occasion for the appropriation of existentially profound, subjectively oriented truth. Kierkegaard’s authorship should be read thematically through the lens of his stated attempt to facilitate occasions for such occasions, for subjective transformation.49 The concept of ‘appropriation’ links Kierkegaard’s understanding of communication to his self-identity as a religious author as well as to his authorial project of reintroducing Christianity into Christendom. For Kierkegaard, appropriation is the goal of earnest communication, particularly communication about matters of religious significance. In the preface to one of his Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Kierkegaard indicates that his authorial objective is the reader’s appropriation of the message. Once the text has been written and released into the world, the responsibility of appropriation shifts to the reader. The reader can choose to actualize or act upon the communication. He says that his discourse Seeks that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, or it does not even seek him. Unaware of the time and the hour, it quietly waits for that right reader to come like the bridegroom and to bring the occasion along with him. Let each do a share – the reader therefore more. The meaning lies in the appropriation. Hence the book’s joyous giving of itself. Here there are no worldly ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ that separate and prohibit appropriating what is the neighbor’s . . . and the appropriation is the reader’s even greater, is his triumphant giving of himself.50

48

49

50

Steven M. Emmanuel, Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 10. See also my discussion of appropriation in Kyle A. Roberts, Emerging Prophet: Kierkegaard and the Postmodern People of God (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013), 70–3. TDIO, 5.

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Kierkegaard does not diminish the role of the communicator so much as emphasize the recipient’s role as active participant in the communication process. The communicator (author, speaker, etc.) provides the occasion for a response, but the successful communication awaits the reader’s appropriation – which Kierkegaard describes as a ‘giving of himself ’.51 Kierkegaard’s trenchant and consistent critique of Christendom had to do with a faulty assumption (in Kierkegaard’s analysis) that possessing cognitive knowledge about theological doctrines sufficed to consider oneself a Christian; such knowledge need not penetrate through intellection all the way to lived existence or behaviour (i.e. to the existential and subjective). In one of his discourses, Kierkegaard says, ‘If it is true that the person who comes to know a little is deceived, is he not also deceived who comes to know so much that he appropriated nothing whatever!’52 To appropriate is to put truth into action, into life. It is to respond to communication actively, by bringing oneself into the communication and by responding to it by doing something with it. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis notes that ‘appropriation’ is the goal of the communicative act of preaching. The ethically earnest Socrates understood what the sophists could not have possibly grasped: preaching is the most difficult of all arts because it cannot be deemed successful communication apart from an active response by the recipient. Apart from the goal of appropriation by the listener, preaching is mere sophistry. Expanding the notion still further, Kierkegaard suggests, ‘Appropriation is precisely the secret of conversation.’53 In other words, a conversation truly counts as communication when all participants are personally engaged in the communicative event. Kierkegaard’s reflection here on the earnestness of the tasks of preaching, conversation and communication in general suggests that, both in his view of the ideal nature of communication and in his own practice of it, Kierkegaard attempted to transcend the hermeneutical dead end which views communication as mere ‘chatter’ or idle and indeterminate play; or, ‘piddling’, to use Kierkegaard’s term. Earnest communication of religiously and existentially significant matters aims towards appropriation of divine revelation and of theological and religious communication oriented towards that revelation; appropriation then issues in subjective, inward transformation. To summarize: For Kierkegaard, appropriation is the responsive actualization of communication, moving beyond merely acknowledging or recognizing something to be true or valuable, and putting truth to work in one’s life, thereby making truth subjectively true for oneself. What good is religious knowledge if it remains at the propositional, cognitive level and does not bear ethically or religiously on how one lives? But for appropriation to take place, the recipient of communication must act and engage; one must respond to the communication by contributing not just objective knowledge and not just cognitive acknowledgement, but by giving of one’s self to the communication, with existential, ethical and religious earnestness. Kierkegaard’s framing of appropriation coheres under the traditional reading of Kierkegaard as an explicitly, intentionally religious and Christian author, who viewed his writings as provocative occasions for readers to engage existentially and subjectively the transformational truth conveyed through his texts, but ultimately pointing towards the truth of divine revelation.

51 52 53

TDIO, 5. TDIO, 21. CA, 16.

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V. KIERKEGAARD’S LECTURES ON COMMUNICATION This point concerning appropriation is made most clear in Kierkegaard’s unfinished and unpublished Lectures on Communication.54 In these lectures, Kierkegaard suggests that the mode or style of communication one uses should change, contingent upon the aim, or desired results, of the communicator. Lurking behind the question of different styles of communication is Kierkegaard’s conviction that divine revelation, as a communication that enters in from outside, as it were, must always be acknowledged as the instance of communication which must demand utmost attention. The lectures reveal that Kierkegaard viewed divine revelation as the ultimate occasion for ethical and religious transformation in the recipient. In these lectures, Kierkegaard notes that communicators should alter their methods in relation to the sphere of existence (aesthetic, ethical and religious) about which and to which they intend to communicate. When one intends to communicate in and to the aesthetic sphere, direct communication can be employed. The objective is to transmit knowledge, or information, which can be objectively communicated and passively received. Aesthetic communication traffics in speculative philosophy and scientific or historical knowledge. As Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus also puts it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ‘Objective thinking is completely indifferent to subjectivity and thereby to inwardness and appropriation; its communication is therefore direct.’55 But while direct communication is an appropriate method of communication with respect to the aesthetic sphere, it proves insufficient in communicating truth related to the ethical and religious spheres. The ethical and the religious spheres call for a different style of communication, since they aim for edification, ‘achieving actuality’56 and appropriation which leads to ethical action. But an important distinction remains between the ethical and the religious spheres. Communication with respect to the ethical, Kierkegaard says, requires that the latent ethical potential (‘capability’) in a person be drawn out, or even ‘lured out’ of one; in this sense the ethical cannot be taught.57 The learner already possesses the needed knowledge. (Think here of Kant’s structures of the mind and the categorical imperative, for example.)58 Therefore, emphasizing communication of the ethical as knowledge only adds to the confusion that knowledge (objectivity) is all that is needed. For communication of the ethical, indirect methods are required, because the communicator of the ethical cannot appeal to his or her authority in order to elicit the desired response. The assertion of authority and the objective approach in direct communication interferes with the learner’s relation to God and with the learner’s task of striving ethically and of discovering the truth within and for himself or herself. As Kierkegaard puts it in his first lecture, ‘What is the basic confusion in modern life if it is not this – that in every communication of truth they consider man to be the authority rather than that God is the authority, especially in religious-ethical communication.’59

54

55

56 57 58 59

These lectures remained unpublished during Kierkegaard’s lifetime but now appear as extensive notes and outlines in the Journals and Papers. JP 1:649–57, pp. 267–308 / SKS 27, Papir 365:2–371:2, pp. 390–430. CUP, 75. He goes on to say, ‘It is obvious that it does not therefore have to be easy. But it is direct; it does not have the illusiveness and the art of double-reflection. It does not have that God-fearing and humane solicitude of subjective thinking in communicating itself; it can be understood directly; it can be reeled off.’ JP 1:653, p. 287 / SKS 27, Papir 368:1, p. 398. JP 1:656, p. 301 / SKS 27, Papir 371:1, p. 422. As Kierkegaard puts it, ‘Every human being knows the ethical.’ JP 1:649, p. 271 / SKS 27, Papir 365:8, p. 395. JP 1:656, p. 298 / SKS 27, Papir 371:1, p. 422.

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The assertion of human authority by the communicator incorrectly represents or suggests that the universal ethical can be cognitively and directly acquired or translated from one person to the other. This is why for Kierkegaard, in all communication related to the ethical and religious spheres, the mode is indirect and involves a subjective communication, or as Climacus puts it, communication is a ‘work of art’, or ‘double reflection’ which instigates the recipient to activate his or her own inwardness.60 The learner possesses a capability (the necessary internal categories and moral capacity) which exists, ready-made, quite apart from the role of the communicator, whose role is to be, like Socrates, a prompter. The teacher’s role is as a gadfly who prods and lures the learner to call upon his or her innate ethical capability, but also to stay out of the way. This method of indirect communication, however, proves insufficient for the communication of religious truth. This is because, just as in the aesthetic sphere, knowledge is once more needed. The necessary knowledge in the religious sphere differs from that of the aesthetic sphere; it has religious and specifically Christian theological content. The difference between the ethical and the religious, then, Kierkegaard explains, is simply this – that the ethical is the universally human itself, but religious (Christian) upbringing must first of all communicate a knowledge. Ethically man as such knows about the ethical, but man as such does not know about the religious in the Christian sense. Here there must be the communication of a little knowledge first of all – but then the same relationship as the ethical enters in. The instruction, the communication, must not be as of a knowledge, but upbringing, practicing, art-instruction.61 Christian religious edification, then, involves a direct communication of ‘a little knowledge’ in a way that ethical upbringing does not. The knowledge required is not extensive and it is not complicated but it is paradoxical and offensive to human reason. This knowledge is the basic story of what has often been taken to be the narrative outline of the Christian Gospel: that God became a single individual man in the person of Jesus Christ, providing atonement for sins. The confrontation with this paradoxical story, that the eternal God entered history and became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, in order to redeem the sins of humanity, provides the occasion for the person to make the movement from the ethical sphere to the religious, in the Christian sense. When the ethical sphere reaches its limits, and a sense of one’s guilt for sin becomes existentially significant, the embrace of the divine gift impels the shift to the religious sphere. The communication need not dwell on the information (only a little is needed); it should promptly move beyond cognitive information into an interest in edification; appropriation, not information, is the end goal. For Kierkegaard, the gospel narratives provide the necessary content, that basic cognitive information; their function is to facilitate the appropriation of the God-man story towards the subjective transformation of one’s life into ethical and religious earnestness. The basic theological or doctrinal information conveyed through divine revelation, in the medium of Scripture or the preaching of the Gospel, is necessary so that one can make 60

CUP, 79. Climacus here goes on to say, Ordinary communication, objective thinking, has no secrets; only doubly reflected subjective thinking has secrets; that is, all its essential content is essentially a secret, because it cannot be communicated directly. This is the significance of the secrecy. That this knowledge cannot be stated directly, because the essential in this knowledge is the appropriation itself, means that it remains a secret for everyone who is not through himself doubly reflected in the same way, but that this is the essential form of truth means that this cannot be said in any other way.

61

JP 1:650, pp. 279–80 / SKS 27, Papir 366:1, p. 399.

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the movement from the ethical, the realm of the universally human, to the particularity of the religious, where one in fear and trembling is challenged and shaped by the Godrelationship. But the direct communication ‘is only a first thing . . . it is only a preliminary’.62 It is up to the learner to existentially appropriate this knowledge inwardly, in the particular, existential situations of his or her life.

VI. THE ‘THEOLOGICAL SELF’ AND THE BIBLE AS COMMUNICATION In the pseudonymous The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard offers a theological anthropology which culminates in the recognition that the achievement of selfhood is a human being’s highest task; in the words of Anti-Climacus, ‘To have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession, an infinite concession, given to man, but it is also eternity’s claim upon him.’63 Anti-Climacus defines the ‘self ’ as a synthesis of the eternal and the temporal: ‘the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude’.64 The dynamic relations that comprise the self, that each of us is infinite and finite, eternal and temporal, free and bound, tempt all of us to live fractured lives, to be at odds with ourselves and to fall into despair and sin. Becoming a self requires relating rightly to God, which is contingent upon the subjective recognition of one’s state as a sinner (or to put it psychologically, ‘despair’) and of one’s need for God. One becomes a ‘theological self ’ by subjectively, inwardly appropriating this understanding of sin and receiving God’s grace.65 Apart from right relation to God and to oneself, a person cannot relate rightly to oneself or to others.66 This is why mere cognitive knowledge, even of necessary orthodox religious truth (i.e. atonement, Christology, sin), while necessary for religious transformation, is not sufficient to become a self, in the sense of Kierkegaard’s ideal. Kierkegaard’s explicitly theological concern shifts from the nature of selfhood and of God as the criterion for the self to the concrete demands of Christian discipleship. In short, ‘What does it mean to be a Christian?’ For Kierkegaard, the answer is found in the call in the gospels to follow the pattern, or ‘prototype’: Jesus Christ, the God-man.67 Kierkegaard develops the significance of Christ as prototype both in his pseudonymous Practice in Christianity and in his signed posthumously published Judge for Yourself!68 In both texts, for Kierkegaard, Jesus Christ confronts the reader as the God-man who demands obedience (‘imitation’, or following) but who always also offers forgiveness and grace. Significantly, for Kierkegaard, Christian discipleship is a matter of following and obeying a person, rather than merely cognitively believing or intellectually assenting to doctrines about that person. In the words of Anti-Climacus, ‘Christ [the person] is infinitely more important than his teaching’.69 Because divine revelation, via the Bible, is the

62 63 64 65

66

67 68 69

JP 1:650, pp. 279–80 / SKS 27, Papir 366:3, p. 401. SUD, 21. SUD, 29. So Anti-Climacus says, ‘This self is no longer the merely human self but is what I, hoping not to be misunderstood, would call the theological self, the self directly before God. And what infinite reality the self gains by being conscious of existing before God, by becoming a human self whose criterion is God.’ SUD, 79. The relationship of the self to God and to others is a consistent theme in Kierkegaard’s discourses, Works of Love. JFY, 188. See especially JFY, 150–209 and PC, 238–9. PC, 124.

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primary medium of authoritative divine communication and outlines the basic content relating the God-man (the ‘prototype’ and cause for offence), it is necessary for Christian discipleship. Christians should look to the Bible, and the gospels especially, as a guide for an ethical and religiously serious life, but only insofar as it facilitates rather than hinders that life. Otherwise, as Kierkegaard elsewhere suggests, people should bring their Bibles ‘out to an open place or up on a mountain’ and give them back to God, so as to disabuse themselves of the notion that they are true Christians.70 Readers of the Bible should therefore approach the Bible as a medium of communication from God (he offers the metaphor of the Bible as a ‘love letter’ from God to the reader),71 looking to obey its commands and follow its teachings, for the purpose of spiritual and religious edification. The more the reader agonizes over interpretative complications and the more the reader relies on critical scholarship and commentaries, the more ‘objective’ and the less existentially dynamic (subjective) the Bible becomes.72 For Kierkegaard, a scholarly preoccupation with hermeneutical questions belies a refusal to arrive at the point of appropriation, leading to action. Kierkegaard perceived that Lutherans in Christendom had taken advantage of Luther’s emphasis on salvation by grace alone, and had thereby abolished the rigour of Christianity. As he puts it, ‘I have wanted to prevent people in “Christendom” from existentially taking in vain Luther and the significance of Luther’s life – I have wished, if possible, to contribute to preventing this.’73 Kierkegaard’s emphasis on communicating in a fresh way the Bible’s commands, directives and high ideals was a primary way he sought to redirect Lutherans away from a misappropriation of grace and towards a deeper commitment to religious faith and its accompanying ethical action; this is what he calls the ‘restlessness of faith’.74 For Kierkegaard, to subjectively engage the Bible for appropriation means that we ‘read a fear and trembling into our soul’ so that we ‘will succeed in becoming a human being’, that is, a unified, synthesized and whole self.75 In the end, divine revelation cannot be engaged adequately through the mode of objectivity. Rather, it requires existential, ethical and spiritual involvement of the person or, in other words, appropriation.

CONCLUSION Some find in Kierkegaard’s writings a hermeneutic indeterminist, whose best communicative efforts ultimately end in ‘chatter’, or indecisive play, resigned as he must be to the complications, ambiguities and yet creative delights of language. Any sense of coherence to his corpus disintegrates in favour of the complexities, diversity and ‘masks’ worn by the numerous authors and perspectives inhabited in the texts. The benefits of this approach to Kierkegaard are that the diversity of his corpus is clearly honoured. It also rightly calls attention to the complex dynamics which attend authorial attempts to communicate. Authors are never truly ‘in control’ of their texts; meaning can and does surpass authorial intentions. Furthermore, an immense significance is ascribed to the role of the reader (Kierkegaard’s ‘single individual’) in engaging the communication; the result is a sense

70 71 72 73 74 75

JP 1:216, p. 87 / SKS 22, NB11:50, p. 33. JP 1:210, p. 85 / SKS 23, NB16:84, p. 151; FSE, 26–32, 229. JP 1:210, p. 85 / SKS 23, NB16:84, p. 151. OMWA, 17. FSE, 18. FSE, 43.

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of freedom the reader would likely enjoy in interacting with and interpreting those texts. But this kind of interpretative freedom can be abused, if it lacks a deep enough sense of the gravitas of responsibility which clearly motivated Kierkegaard. His refusal to assert his authority as author and his shifting of the weight of responsibility to the reader was not for the purpose of interpretative freedom alone. Yes, the empirical, historical Kierkegaard fades to black as the content of the text, the issue at hand, emerges as primary. But the import of this is not to undermine Kierkegaard’s religious and Christian theological orientation (including the role of transcendence in his ontology), nor to marginalize or ignore altogether Kierkegaard’s stated authorial aims, nor even to set loose readers to engage the texts with whatever interpretative aims they please. Granted, for many readers, the centrality of Christian theological ideas in his works, the importance of a concept of divine revelation and the important role that Christian orthodoxy played in his religious philosophy are viewed as unfortunate by-products or even obstacles that get in the way of his deeper, more penetrating insights. But the clarity of his articulations about his religious purposes, and the pervasiveness of the theological content, should persuade us to acknowledge that Kierkegaard means what he says and we should take him (in the main, at least) at his word, honouring the communicative goals which he has articulated for posterity – even when and where the reader would take issue with those goals. While Kierkegaard’s corpus is no doubt a complicated authorship with nuances and insights that obviously transcend Christian theology and religion more broadly, the Christian, theological thread runs across the boundaries of signed and pseudonymous, direct and indirect. Kierkegaard ties the polyonymity, however loosely, to an orientation towards God and an earnestness towards the outcome of deeper religious devotion, more honesty and sincerity and more earnest ethical action. We should also discover, in our glance across the diverse but thematic coherence of the writings, a brilliant and flawed communicator whose authorship serves as a demonstration of the challenges of communication, but also an admirable attempt to communicate effectively. In the end, Kierkegaard did not care about his readers taking him seriously, but he did seem to care very much about readers earnestly and seriously considering the content of his communication – with the underlying hope that the communicative event would result in appropriation – and in the recovery of a Christian Gospel that incorporates rigour, ethical seriousness and restless action under the umbrella of grace. Kierkegaard is fascinated by the problem of communication, but he refuses to piddle and he does not want us to piddle, either. He wants to awaken us.

FURTHER READING Emmanuel, Steven M. Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Gouwens, David J. Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Law, David R. ‘A Cacophony of Voices: The Multiple Authors and Readers of Kierkegaard’s The Point of View for My Work as an Author’. In International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Point of View, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 12–47. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2010. Tietjen, Mark A. Kierkegaard, Communication, and Virtue: Authorship as Edification. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2013. Walsh, Sylvia. Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.

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CHAPTER THREE

Kierkegaard on Language: Peril and Promise RANDALL C. ZACHMAN

INTRODUCTION Søren Kierkegaard was acutely aware of the peril and promise of Christian language, and his reflections on this issue constitute an enduring and unique challenge to the practice of theology in the academy and the church in our own day. In what follows, we will examine Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the origins of the degradation of Christian language, followed by his prescription for how to correct this degradation in order to restore Christian language to its genuine meaning. Such an analysis is different than studying the different ways Kierkegaard himself uses language. As we shall see, Kierkegaard sets forth a goal for the genuine use of Christian language that he never claims to have attained, which would fit with his claim that he wrote mainly with himself in mind, for his own upbuilding and awakening. He could see the ideal of what Christian language should be, and hold it before himself and others in his own writings, without ever being able to claim that he himself had attained that ideal. We shall therefore be examining his reflections about that ideal and not the extent to which his own writings and life approached or approximated that ideal. However, Kierkegaard’s experience as a religious poet and author gave him important insights into the promise and peril of human language in general which allowed him to diagnose the peril and promise of specifically Christian language. On the one hand, as a self-described poet, Kierkegaard explored the many ways he could use language to affect the reader or listener, in an attempt to build up or awaken the reader or listener. He was especially interested in the way that irony can conceal the speaker from the listener, so that the listener must decide the meaning of what she is hearing or reading. He was continually exploring the dynamics of the Danish language and sought to make a major contribution to Danish literature. When he thought he was finally bringing his authorship to a close in 1851, he wished ‘to commend these writings to the people whose language I with filial devotion and with almost feminine infatuation am proud to have the honor to write, yet also with the consolation that it will not be to their discredit that I have written in it’.1 On the other hand, Kierkegaard was keenly aware of the peril of language, especially when it is detached from the life and existence of the speaker and listener. Kierkegaard was convinced that the greatest danger posed to language was the growing 1

WA, 166.

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journalism of his day, for journalists hid behind their anonymity in order to speak on behalf of ‘the people’ to bring down or level particular individuals.2 Kierkegaard was also concerned about the rapidity of journalistic communication, for he thought that the speed and efficiency of communication was inversely proportional to the significance of what was being communicated.3 Besides increasing the amount of noise in the culture of his day, the press encourages the illusion that Kierkegaard was especially concerned to eradicate, that the truth lies in the crowd, not in the single individual.4

I. KIERKEGAARD ON THE PERIL OF CHRISTIAN LANGUAGE The Perversion of Language by Journalists, Professors and Pastors Kierkegaard had planned to bring his authorship and work as a poet to a close with the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, but he was spurred on to the next phase of his authorship by means of his personal experience with the dark side of language exhibited by journalism. Out of concern for those authors being ridiculed by the satirical journal The Corsair, as well as the fact that this journal praised the author of Either/Or, Kierkegaard invited the journal to attack him. As a result, Kierkegaard was subjected to a year of satirical ridicule by The Corsair, while the very people Kierkegaard meant to help by inviting this attack on himself remained silent. This attack permanently changed life in Copenhagen for Kierkegaard, for even common people he had never met felt free to ridicule him. Moreover, this attack gave rise to a second wave of writing, often called ‘the second authorship’, which consisted mainly of books published between 1847 and 1851 in Kierkegaard’s own name. The subject of this authorship was not the degradation of language in journalism (though that was never far from his mind), but rather the degradation of language in the church, especially by the pastors and the professors of theology. Kierkegaard’s experience of ridicule by anonymous writers speaking objectively on behalf of ‘the people’ made him increasingly aware of the relationship between language and existence in the Christian community. Kierkegaard and The Corsair had used the same language – the language of irony, satire and humour – but the result was dramatically different for each side of the engagement. Kierkegaard used this language to bring about his own defeat by drawing the ridicule of the journal against himself, while the journal sought to defeat Kierkegaard with the help of the ridicule it inspired in ‘the people’. Similarly, the pastors and professors of theology use the same language used by Jesus and the apostles, but the result of their use of this language is dramatically different. When Jesus and the apostles spoke, the result was their experience of opposition, suffering and death at the hands of ‘the people’. When the pastors and professors of theology speak, the result is a successful career sufficient to support a wife and children, underwritten by the financial support of ‘the people’, culminating not in suffering and death, but in the attainment of rewards and honour in church and state. The difference does not lie in the language that they use, for they both say the same thing. It lies rather in their own personal existence. Jesus and the apostles have died to the world, in which they also suffer and die, and have their existence in spirit and eternity, which lies in a sphere above the world. Pastors and professors have their lives entirely in this world, in which they seek to

2 3 4

JP 6:6886, pp. 516–17 / SKS 21, NB10:161, pp. 335–6. FSE, 48. JP 3:2950, p. 317 / SKS 23, NB15:40, p. 29.

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enjoy themselves as much as possible, consoled by the hope of eternity beyond the death that haunts them.

The Origin of Christian Language in Secular Language The pastors and professors are aided in this transformation of Christian language by the nature of language itself, which is entirely secular in origin. The original referent of any language we use is this world, that is, it is ‘secular’. The apostles do not have any other language to use than secular language. If there is to be a transformation in the way they use language, it will not come from the language itself, but rather from their own personal transformation by the awakening of spirit within themselves. This transformation in their own existence also transforms the language they use, for it becomes metaphorical language, even though it is originally secular language. The person in whom the spirit has awakened does not as a consequence abandon the visible world. Although conscious of himself as spirit, he continues to remain in the visible world and to be visible to the senses – in the same way he also remains in the language, except that his language is the metaphorical language! But the metaphorical words are of course not brand-new words, but are the already given words.5 The metaphorical meaning does not simply raise secular language to the higher level in which spirit lives, but it also inverts the meaning of secular language when it is spoken by someone in whom spirit has awakened. The Christian language uses the same words we men use, and in that respect desires no change. But its use of them is qualitatively different from our use of them; it uses the words inversely for Christianity makes manifest one sphere more or a higher sphere than the one in which we men naturally live, and in this sphere ordinary human language is reflected inversely.6 Thus, when the world speaks of ‘gain’, it thinks of enjoying this life, and it thinks of suffering and death as ‘loss’. Those in whom spirit has awakened use the same terms, but they mean the opposite by them, as they see dying to the world as gain, and possessing the whole world as the greatest loss. By having their existence in the world and its enjoyment, pastors and professors transform Christian language by dragging it down from its inverted metaphorical meaning to its original secular meaning. The result is the creation of the opposite of Christianity, something Kierkegaard called ‘Christendom’. And so we let Christianity talk away – and afterwards preach it in our own language and call it Christianity. As in music we speak of transposing a part to a key different from that in which it was originally written, so the Christian language is wholly and entirely qualitatively different from our language at every point, even though we use the same words. Christendom’s great feat was to transpose Christian language back into the old wretched gabble – and in this way we all have become Christians.’7

5 6

7

WL, 209. JP 3:2333, p. 11 / SKS 26, NB32:118, p. 207. See Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). JP 3:2333, p. 11 / SKS 26, NB32:118, p. 207.

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This move represents the abolition of Christianity, but this abolition is concealed from Christendom by its use of the same language used by Christianity.

Speaking in Christian Categories, Living in Secular Categories In his second authorship, Kierkegaard seeks to free those caught up in Christendom from the self-deception created by its use of Christian language, so that they might transform such language by the awakening of spirit and speak Christian language according to its properly metaphorical and inverted meaning. Kierkegaard is especially concerned that his readers become aware of the way that their use of Christian language is not reflected in their lives. ‘They think in entirely different categories from those in which they live. They speak in religious categories and live in categories of sensuousness, the categories of immediate well-being.’8 The problem is that our ability to use language deceives us into thinking that our use of Christian language itself means that our lives express what we are saying. If we use the language that expresses spirit, we think that our lives are spirit. I may not be far off if I say: man is nonsense – and he is that with the aid of language. With the aid of language every man participates in the highest – but to participate in the highest with the aid of language, in the sense of talking about it, is just as ironical as being a spectator in the gallery observing the royal dinner table. If I were a pagan I would say that an ironical deity had bestowed the gift of speech upon man in order to amuse himself by watching this self-deception.9 Our being nonsense by means of language is vividly exemplified by the well-fed and widely respected pastor preaching that the truth is ridiculed, or the pastor associating with the upper class of society preaching that Christ went about with tax collectors and sinners. Such preaching forgets that our existence preaches much more powerfully than our language. The essential sermon is one’s own existence [Existents]. A person preaches with this every hour of the day and with power quite different from that of the most eloquent speaker in his most eloquent moment. To let one’s existence express the opposite and then let one’s mouth run with eloquent babbling about the opposite is in the deepest sense nonsense and, Christianly, this means to become liable to eternal judgment, even though in the temporal world it is the way to high positions, honor, reputation, popularity, and the like.10 Those who hear such preaching participate in the same sort of nonsense, by means of their ability to deceive themselves by their use of Christian language. ‘The thing that confuses everything is this advantage man has over the animal, his ability to talk. It permits a person’s life to express the lowest while his mouth prattles about the highest and to give assurances that this is what determines him.’11 Our use of Christian language not only stands in stark contrast with our secular existence but also keeps us from realizing that our existence contradicts what we are saying. The mask of language makes us appear to be Christian when our lives clearly express that we are not.

8 9 10 11

JP 1:1044, pp. 454–5 / SKS 20, NB:103, p. 80. JP 1:89, p. 36 / SKS 26, NB33:61, p. 310. JP 1:1056, pp. 459–60 / SKS 22, NB12:107, p. 202. JP 2:2337, pp. 13–14 / SKS 26, NB35:33, p. 392.

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It is very characteristic of Christianity in Christendom that it is a Sunday service. We dress up in nice clothes on Sunday, and in a more profound sense we disguise ourselves; we dress ourselves up in the whole Christian terminology, and the pastor is especially and remarkably well disguised – and in the quiet hour this Christianity will seem to fit the design rather well.12

Pastors as Actors in the Theatre Even though Kierkegaard thinks that everyone in Christendom participates in the selfdeceptive use of Christian language, he claims that pastors and professors of theology bear a greater responsibility for this state of affairs. Pastors seem unaware that the most effective sermon is preached by their existence, as one can see in the life of Christ and the apostles: ‘in the most profound sense the pastor has the task of preaching with his life. Yes, somewhat paradoxically he could say: Preaching is much like keeping one’s mouth shut but expressing existentially, indeed, with his life, what is ordinarily expressed with words.’13 Because they ignore the question of what their own existence expresses, pastors turn themselves into actors who play a specific role by means of their use of the language of others. The worship service itself helps to intensify this association of preaching with acting, as its use of architecture, visual arts and music helps to create the same aesthetic mood as does theatre. The sermon fits into this whole aesthetic presentation, as the preacher uses language to appeal to the imagination of the congregation to intensify its aesthetic experience in worship.14 If the question of existence is left out of consideration, then there is no clear difference between a pastor preaching a sermon in church and an actor delivering a soliloquy in a theatre. ‘If it is assumed that speaking is sufficient for the proclamation of Christianity, then we have transformed the church into a theater and can have an actor learn a sermon and splendidly, masterfully deliver it with facial expressions, gesticulations, modulation, tears, and everything a theater-going public might desire.’15 The only thing distinguishing the language of the preacher from the language of the actor is the existence of the preacher, which guarantees that what is proclaimed is the faith of the preacher. By allowing their personal existence to proclaim the opposite of their language in the sermon, pastors guarantee that congregations see worship as comparable to their experience of theatre, and congregations even compliment their preaching according to aesthetic categories. ‘The rule in original Christianity was: your life should guarantee what you say. The modern rule is: by expressing just the opposite of what you depict beautifully and picture fascinatingly, your life should guarantee that the whole thing is a game, a theatrical treat – then the congregation declares: By God, that was a lovely sermon.’16

Theologians Change Christian Language into Objective Doctrine The deceptive use of Christian language in Christendom is aided by the work of professors of theology. Like pastors, professors of theology pay no attention to the question of what

12 13 14 15 16

JP 3:3537, p. 619 / SKS 26, NB32:109, p. 198. JP 3:3488, pp. 592–3 / SKS 26, NB34:8, p. 319. JP 3:3488, pp. 592–3 / SKS 26, NB34:8, p. 319. JP 3:3519, pp. 606–7 / SKS 24, NB23:217, pp. 312–13. JP 4:4559, pp. 356–7 / SKS 24, NB22:98, p. 158.

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their own existence expresses, and whether their lives exhibit anything resembling the life of Christ: ‘yes, it did not occur to a single one of them to take the New Testament and read it directly and simply and before God ask himself the question: Does my life in any manner, even the remotest, resemble Christ’s life, so that I dare call myself a follower or imitator.’17 Instead, professors of theology write books of theology, even of systematic theology, and contribute to journals of theology that review these books of theology. Hence their lives express that Christianity is a matter of understanding doctrine, not a question of one’s own personal existence. ‘What does the “professor” express? The “professor” expresses that religion is a matter of learning; the professor is the greatest satire on the “apostle.” ’18 Whereas the apostle spoke to all people, unlearned as well as learned, about the nature of Christian existence, the professor turns Christianity into objective doctrine that must be appropriated by the understanding, and defended against doubt. ‘To the professor corresponds Christianity as objective teaching, doctrine.’19 The professor uses theological reflection upon objective doctrine to conceal the fact that his life contradicts the doctrine he seeks to understand. Even if he is developing ethical doctrine, he does not want the question of personal existence to arise and so conceals the lack of existence by making language about the ethical the most important thing, in a way that intimidates the unlearned. ‘But theory, doctrine, produces an illusion, as if one were related to the ethical – by talking about it. Theory and doctrine are a fig leaf, and by means of this fig leaf a professor or clergyman looks so portentous that it is terrifying.’20 By turning Christianity into doctrine that appeals to the reason and understanding of others, professors of theology raise the spectre of doubt, and they are convinced that doubt must be answered before there can be any faith or obedience. This increases the amount of talking that must be done, and infinitely delays the transition from doctrine to existence.21 This also secures the place of the professor of theology in the church, and places those with less understanding far below him.22

Changing the Audience from the Suffering Poor to the Happy Rich The change of Christian language from existence to theatre (the pastor) or to objective doctrine (the professor) is accompanied by a change in the intended audience for the Christian message. ‘If Christianity relates to anyone in particular, then it may especially be said to belong to the suffering, the poor, the sick, the leprous, the mentally ill, and so on, to sinners, criminals.’23 Jesus reminds us of this when he explicitly says that the Gospel is preached to the poor. ‘Here the word “poor” does not mean simply poverty but all who suffer, are unfortunate, wretched, wronged, crippled, lame, leprous, demonic. The gospel is preached to them, that is, the gospel is for them. The gospel is good news for them.’24 Kierkegaard thinks that the Gospel is preached specifically to the poor, that is, to those who suffer, because the Gospel proclaims that suffering itself is a sign of the Godrelationship. God loves those who suffer, especially if they have no one else to love them.

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

JP 3:3568, pp. 637–8 / SKS 23, NB17:59, pp. 200–1. JP 3:3568, pp. 637–8 / SKS 23, NB17:59, pp. 200–1. FSE, 195. JP 4:3870, pp. 22–3 / SKS 22, NB13:49, p. 304. FSE, 195–6. JP 4:3870, pp. 22–3 / SKS 22, NB13:49, p. 304. JP 1:386, p. 159 / SKS 26, NB32:109, pp. 197–8. JP 4:4685, p. 410 / SKS 25, NB26:30, p. 36.

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The Gospel is meant especially to address those whose sufferings are so extreme that they have been abandoned by the pity and sympathy of the human community. No, for the poor the gospel is the good news that to be unfortunate in this world (in such a way that one is abandoned by human sympathy, and the worldly zest for life even cruelly tries to make one’s misfortune into guilt) is a sign of the Godrelationship, that these poor from whom the generation divorces itself even more cruelly by making it a matter of their own guilt – that the good news is precisely for them.25 Since the Gospel is proclaimed to those who are poor and who suffer, it can only be proclaimed by those who are voluntarily poor and who are willing to suffer for the sake of the message that they proclaim.26 Christendom has altered this situation completely. Since it has secularized Christian language by adapting it to the secular concern to enjoy this life in the hope of eternity, it is deeply threatened by the presence of those who suffer, especially those whose suffering seems to place them beyond the help of human sympathy. Just the fact that Christianity drags these poor wretches into the picture, brings them, so to speak, into society’s consciousness, offends the natural man; drags them into the picture – why? – to console them. Well, thanks, says the natural man; we prefer to know nothing about such sufferings; that is why we have places far removed and remote from society where we shove them away.27 Once the poor and suffering have been hidden far away from ‘Christian’ society, the need for voluntary poverty and suffering in the existence of those who preach to them is also eliminated. Since both pastors and professors of theology teach for the sake of a lucrative and well-rewarded career, it is only natural that they should see their primary audience not as the poor, who have nothing to offer them, but as the wealthy, who can support their secular ambitions. ‘Christianity (the glad news for those who suffer) has really reached the point that the sufferers are not benefitted at all, but rather that one ingratiates himself with the fortunate and the powerful by preaching to them a cozy Christianity. This is what the “teachers” are doing since preaching Christianity is their career.’28 The secularization of Christian language means that the very people for whom the Gospel is intended are shoved out of the way and hidden from sight, so that their place can be taken by those who offer pastors and professors the best chance of having careers that will support their enjoyment of life. In other words, when proclaiming Christianity is a livelihood, if possible even a lush livelihood, then, yes, then the gospel is preached best of all – for the rich – nothing is more obvious. When proclaiming Christianity means acquiring rank and title, if possible, a high rank and title, and medallions and ribbons – then, yes, then Christianity is proclaimed best of all for the mighty etc.29

25 26 27 28 29

JP 4:4685, p. 410 / SKS 25, NB26:30, p. 36. JP 4:4697, pp. 421–2 / SKS 25, NB27:28, p. 146. JP 3:3501, pp. 598–9 / SKS 23, NB18:78, pp. 305–6. JP 4:4697, pp. 421–2 / SKS 25, NB27:28, p. 146. JP 4:4685, pp. 410–11 / SKS 25, NB26:30, p. 36.

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Not Suffering But Success as the Sign of the God-Relationship The presupposition of Christian preaching is also entirely reversed. Rather than poverty and suffering being a sign of the God-relationship, success in one’s career and the enjoyment of this life come to be seen as the sign of one’s relationship to God. ‘Look,’ they say, ‘because this man is pious and God-fearing, everything goes well for him, this is why he amasses one barrel of gold after another, and when he responds to the proclaimers of Christianity with an appropriate contribution, they vouch for him that it is God’s blessing, that it is because he is a true Christian, because this is most convenient both for him and for the preachers.’30 The result is that the suffering of the poor is increased by ‘Christians’ who tell them their suffering is a sign of their guilt, over against the ‘piety’ of the wealthy and successful. ‘But this prompts the old atrocity again – namely, the idea that the unfortunate, the poor are to blame for their condition, that it is because they are not pious, are not true Christians.’31 The Gospel that was to be proclaimed to the poor and suffering for their consolation has been transformed into a message that has nothing to say to them, no consolation to offer, because the career pastors and professors wish to be completely unaware that such suffering even exists.32 Christendom can exhibit such cruel indifference to the poor and suffering, in direct contrast to Christianity, because it has replaced the concern for existence with the concern for doctrine. So long as the right doctrine is being preached, it does not matter what our existence is expressing, and we remain utterly unconcerned that our Christian language completely contradicts our secular existence. In fact, the more we treat doctrine as objectively true, the more we think we keep from distorting doctrine by introducing a subjective element to it. ‘We center all our attention upon an objectivity, doctrine, for example, or the sacraments, and then in lofty tones speak disparagingly about the subjective – rascals that we are!’33 The focus on doctrine also transforms Christianity into a problem of knowledge rather than a question of existence, which enhances the status of the professors of theology and the pastors they train. ‘Christian knowledge, if it does not change life, makes matters worse in proportion to the increase in knowledge.’34 The pastors and professors compound the replacement of existence with doctrine by placing the controversy between orthodoxy and heterodoxy at the center of the church’s life, which allows the church to ignore the question of what our personal existence is expressing, and increases the status of the mastery of doctrine exhibited by pastors and professors.

II. KIERKEGAARD ON RECOVERING THE PROMISE OF CHRISTIAN LANGUAGE Christian Language Is Existence-Communication, Not Doctrine Kierkegaard counters the emphasis on doctrine in Christendom by insisting that Christian language should not be understood as doctrine, but as existential-communication.35 As 30 31 32 33 34 35

JP 4:4685, pp. 410–11 / SKS 25, NB26:30, p. 36. JP 4:4685, pp. 410–11 / SKS 25, NB26:30, p. 36. JP 3:3498, pp. 596–7 / SKS 23, NB18:5, pp. 257–8. JP 2:1906, pp. 350–1 / SKS 24, NB24:118, p. 395. JP 2:2303, p. 539 / SKS 22, NB14:26, p. 358. JP 1:484, p. 191 / SKS 21, NB6:56, p. 41.

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existential-communication, it cannot be a matter of indifference what the existence of the speaker also expresses, as would be the case with objectively true doctrine and objectively efficacious sacraments. Rather, the speaker must strive to imitate the teaching and express it as much as possible in his or her existence. Kierkegaard describes this process as one in which the speaker ‘reduplicates’ the spoken message in his existence. ‘When Christianity (precisely because it is not a doctrine) does not reduplicate itself in the one who presents it, he does not present Christianity; for Christianity is an existential-communication and can only be presented – by existing. Basically, to exist therein [at existere deri], to express it in one’s existence etc. – this is what it means to reduplicate.’36 The Christian witness expresses the Gospel both in language and in personal existence, realizing that the most powerful witness is given in existence, even when no words are spoken. ‘Thus both word and existence belong to the proclamation of Christianity. If one must be lacking, then preferably the former.’37 The consequence is that the true teachers of Christianity must live in such a way that their lives express the same message as their language, for they realize that their lives preach far more powerfully than their language. ‘No, everything is done to the end that his proclamation may become a pure and personal transparency, that his life may be his teaching.’38

Authority and the Appeal to Conscience When a teacher succeeds in reduplicating the Christian message in his existence, he can be said to speak with authority. Kierkegaard insists that the Gospel is not a theory proposed to the understanding, which can be doubted or proven by rational reasons, but is rather authoritative teaching, which is directed to the conscience of the person who hears it: ‘the one with authority, therefore, always appeals to the conscience, not to the understanding, intelligence, profundity – to the human being, not to the professor.’39 The goal of the teacher is therefore to bring the conscience of the listener to submit itself to the authority of the Gospel. The one with authority says, ‘I cannot, I dare not compel you to obey, but through the relationship of your conscience to God, I make you eternally responsible for your relationship to this doctrine by my having proclaimed it as revealed to me and therefore by having proclaimed it with divine authority.’40 The appeal to conscience also means that the teacher is willing to make every sacrifice for the Gospel, over against the pastor and the professor, who hope to profit from the doctrine in terms of livelihood and status. ‘Authority . . . means by a firm and conscious resolution to be willing to sacrifice everything, one’s life, for one’s cause; it means to articulate a cause in such a way that a person is in identity with himself about needing nothing and fearing nothing. This recklessness of infinity is authority.’41 Such willingness to make every sacrifice for the teaching gives the life and existence of the teacher the proper transparency to the teaching, so that her existence reduplicates the message, and she speaks with authority. Since Kierkegaard does not think that he reduplicates the Gospel in his own existence, he always insists that he speaks and writes ‘without authority’. He therefore refuses to call

36 37 38 39 40 41

JP 1:484, p. 191 / SKS 21, NB6:56, p. 41. JP 3:3519, pp. 606–7 / SKS 24, NB23:217, pp. 312–13. JP 3:3228, pp. 490–1 / SKS 27, Papir 559, p. 662. JP 1:183, p. 73 / SKS 20, NB3:17, p. 254. WA, 97. JP 1:183, p. 73 / SKS 20, NB3:17, p. 254.

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himself a teacher of Christianity, but rather refers to himself as an assistant teacher. ‘He who himself expresses existentially what he teaches is a “teacher”; the next class could be called assistant teachers, their value is in testifying to the truth, pointing out what it is to be a teacher, but admitting that they themselves are not that.’42 Kierkegaard’s task as an assistant teacher is to try to reclaim the genuine meaning of Christian language, understood as existential-communication, without simultaneously appealing to his own personal existence to undergird the legitimacy and power of his teaching. Kierkegaard hopes that it might be possible to bring his reader to submit her conscience to the divine authority of the Gospel solely by means of the language he uses in his religious writings, without any appeal to his own personal authority to do this.

From the Congregation to the Confessional Kierkegaard thinks that the best context in which to realize this objective would be the confessional. Over against Christendom, which thinks it best to communicate the Gospel to a large congregation, Kierkegaard claims that Christianity can best be taught to another individual. Over against the artistic performance of the pastor before a large congregation, whose sermon is indistinguishable from the soliloquy of an actor, Kierkegaard thinks that Christianity can best be communicated in the confessional, where the pastor and the one confessing are alone together. Whereas the pastor in the sermon speaks loudly to a large multitude, the pastor in the confessional speaks softly to another individual. ‘This difference alone: what I have to say requires quiet almost like that of an individual in the confessional – what the others say is better off the more thousands there are to hear.’43 The intimate context of the confessional also encourages the one confessing to seek to become transparent to herself, so that she can see her life the way God sees it, and see what her existence is expressing now, so that she is prepared for the same transparency when she dies.44 Kierkegaard is convinced that the confessional would be the ideal place to free the professor from the illusion of Christendom, for the confessional makes Christian teaching a matter of conscience, and not a matter of the understanding. Learning that Christianity relates to conscience rather than to reason and understanding will teach the professor a new language, the language of Christianity, for conscience brings to the fore the question of my own existence, not the issue of my mastery of objectively true doctrine. ‘What is lacking is the conscience-relationship to Christianity. The “theological professor” must learn what the N.T. quite simply obliges him and every Christian to learn – so he learns to speak another language altogether.’45 Kierkegaard thinks that the abolition of private confession in Denmark represents another triumph of the distortion of Christian language in Christendom, for it removes the application of the Gospel to the conscience of the individual, and transforms the Gospel into an aesthetic performance before a large congregation. ‘And the whole proclamation of Christianity became oratorical eloquence, the art of speaking, which quite rightly omitted the decisively Christian element: the application, the single individual.’46

42 43 44 45 46

JP 4:4312, p. 229 / SKS 24, NB25:60, p. 477. JP 4:4965, p. 557 / SKS 22, NB13:74, pp. 318–19. JP 4:3955, p. 86 / SKS 24, NB22:90, pp. 152–3. JP 3:3569, pp. 638–9 / SKS 23, NB17:63, p. 209. JP 1:598, p. 242 / SKS 24, NB22:81, p. 145.

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Go into Your Room, Lock the Door, and Read to Yourself Since Kierkegaard was not ordained as a pastor, he could not in fact take individuals into the confessional to teach them Christianity (if such confessionals could be found in the Copenhagen of his day). Instead, Kierkegaard asks the reader to go into her room, lock the door, and speak to herself, for this is religious communication, not preaching loudly before a large congregation: ‘for religiousness the main point is rather to speak quite softly with oneself. Ah, it gets so turned around! We think that religiousness, instead of being a matter of every individual’s going alone into his private room to talk quietly with himself, is a matter of talking very loudly.’47 In the absence of taking the reader into the confessional, the next best thing is to speak to oneself in a private room, following the commandment of Jesus that we go into our room, close the door, and speak to God in secret. ‘On the whole, I think I have discovered that Christianity can be communicated relevantly only in a private room, and the larger the group the less the essentially Christian comes forth, and it becomes almost ridiculous.’48 Being alone in a room with the door locked conveys the same impression as does the solitude of the confessional, that one has only to do with oneself, and not with others. This is why pastors like to preach in large congregations, for they focus on preaching objective doctrine to others, not on preaching the Gospel to themselves in the presence of others. ‘The reason why sophists are so eager to preach in a chock-full church is that if they were to say what they have to say in an empty room they would become anxious and afraid for themselves, for they would notice that it pertains to themselves.’49 The other problem with preaching to a large congregation is that one must speak in a loud voice, and Kierkegaard is convinced that this also distorts the nature of Christian language, which must be spoken softly to ourselves. ‘My relation is to inward deepening and not to dissemination. This voice with its subdued inwardness has convinced me; that which is true for one when said in this subdued tone becomes untruth for me as soon as I raise my voice to say the same thing. Why the roaring and shouting?’50 In order to assist the reader in this conversation with herself, Kierkegaard writes various kinds of discourses and deliberations – upbuilding as well as Christian – and asks the reader to go into her room, lock the door, and read the discourses to herself. This allows the reader to follow Kierkegaard’s practice when he wrote the discourses: he locked the door, and wrote them as though he were speaking only to himself.51 He says he did this because he could not learn about Christianity from any of the alleged teachers of his day. I listened and listened, but if what I heard was supposed to be Christianity, then there was no help for me. So I became a speaker myself. This accounts for my knowing with certainty what our pastors seldom know, that there is one who benefits from these discourses: I myself. I am the exact opposite of other speakers: they are preoccupied with speaking to others – I speak to myself.52

47 48 49 50 51 52

JP 2:1995, p. 397 / SKS 20, NB:92, p. 76. JP 3:2948, p. 316 / SKS 22, NB13:52, p. 307. JP 3:3517, p. 606 / SKS 22, NB13:52, p. 307. JP 3:3521, pp. 607–8 / SKS 24, NB24:68, p. 363. FSE, 91. JP 6:6424, p. 168 / SKS 22, NB11:181, p. 109.

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However, the practice of reading aloud to oneself in a room also mirrors Kierkegaard’s upbringing, for his father used to read Mynster’s published sermons to him in a room, and this gave Kierkegaard his first decisive impression of Christianity.53 When Kierkegaard was engaged to Regine Olsen, he followed the same practice, and read Mynster’s sermons to her to give her a proper religious upbringing.54 Moreover, Kierkegaard continued to read Mynster’s sermons to himself long after his father died, for his own upbuilding. The one thing his father and he would add is the question of their own existence, namely, to act according to what one is hearing.55 Hence Kierkegaard’s discourses could be seen as being modelled in part on his own use of Mynster’s sermons, while making it clear that the imitation of the heard message is critical, since Christianity is existential-communication. The first upbuilding discourse Kierkegaard published in his second authorship combines his concern to take the reader into the confessional and his concern that the reader read the book aloud to himself, for he wrote the discourse on the occasion of a confession. This occasion brings the reader into greater silence and solitude, as the occasion of confession reveals that we are all single individuals, even if we are married and go to confession together. ‘Each one is alone as a single individual before God; husband and wife, even though they go together to confession, nevertheless do not confess together, because the person who is confessing is not in a company; he is as a single individual alone before God.’56 The occasion of confession also brings the reader into the presence of God, which changes everything that Kierkegaard is going to say, and that the reader is going to say to herself using Kierkegaard’s words. This situation of speaking his words to oneself in the presence of God clearly distinguishes the upbuilding discourse from the performance of an actor. The reader is not to act as the audience and judge the performance of the author of the discourse according to aesthetic categories. Rather, the reader is to use Kierkegaard’s words to read to himself in the presence of God: ‘but the main thing, the earnestness, is that the listener, with the help of the discourse and before God, in silence speaks in himself, with himself, to himself.’57 The reader speaks to herself in the presence of God, and this is decisive, for it awakens in her the need to pay attention to herself.58 Paying attention to oneself in the presence of God is precisely the role of conscience in a person’s life, and so it is no accident that the discourse will ask the reader to begin to discern the voice of conscience within himself. ‘What else, indeed, is the accounting of eternity than that the voice of conscience is installed eternally in its eternal right to be the only voice?’59 The voice of conscience makes the words of Kierkegaard that I read aloud to myself an existential-communication, for conscience asks me only about my own responsibility for my own existence before God: ‘eternity takes hold of each one separately with the strong arm of conscience, encircles him as the single individual, sets him apart with his conscience.’60 Kierkegaard seems convinced that the practice of reading his discourses aloud to oneself will help one hear and develop the voice of conscience as the only voice, and one will therefore read to oneself in order to inform the conscience rather than to satisfy the understanding. So long as I read Kierkegaard to myself with my 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

JP 6:6627, p. 321 / SKS 23, NB18:77, p. 305. JP 5:5689, p. 243 / SKS 18, JJ:145, p. 187. JP 6:6748, p. 392 / SKP X 6 B 171. UDVS, 151. UDVS, 124. UDVS, 125. UDVS, 128. UDVS, 133.

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conscience in mind, I cannot be offended by what he has me say to myself through his words, even though they may challenge me profoundly.61

Using Language to Speak to God in Prayer Once we have learned to speak to ourselves in the presence of God, so that we begin to hear the voice of conscience as the only voice, Kierkegaard wants us then to speak directly to God in prayer. But again, genuine prayer does not take place in the midst of a large congregation, but rather when I lock my door and pray to God in secret. Kierkegaard consistently describes praying to God in secret as the highest in human life. ‘Christianity, however, immediately teaches a person the shortest way to find the highest. Shut your door and pray to God – because God is surely the highest.’62 Just as speaking to myself in the presence of God allows me to begin to hear the voice of conscience so that I can begin to take responsibility for my existence as a single individual, so also praying to God in secret begins to develop my intimate relationship with God, as I learn how to confide in God and consult with God about the nature of my own personal existence. We must first learn to stop using language to speak to others and use it instead to speak to ourselves, so that we develop an intimate relationship with ourselves before God.63 We must subsequently stop using language to consult with others, and instead use language to consult directly and immediately with God. ‘The reason why the world does not advance but goes backward is that men consult only with each other instead of each one individually consulting with God.’64 The fact that others, such as Martin Luther, have had intimate relationships with God does not help me at all, if I do not develop my own relationship with God by locking the door and praying to God in secret. ‘God says, have I not had it proclaimed that every man, unconditionally every man, can turn to me – and therefore that other persons can certainly do it as well.’65 Thus, Kierkegaard would say to any who would admire him or follow him: ‘I would say to him, and it is the only thing I will say: Go home, lock your door, and pray to God, and you will have infinitely more than the fragment you can get second-hand from me.’66 Kierkegaard found his own relationship to God to be the most intimate and confidential of his life, as he consulted with and confided in God in a way he did not do with any other human being.67 But he did not want us to admire him for this, but rather to learn how to develop our own intimate relationship with God, by locking the door and confiding in God as our most intimate confidant, and by consulting with God as our most reliable guide and teacher.

Learning Silence in Order to Hear God Speaking Just as speaking to ourselves in the presence of God creates the silence we need to begin to hear the voice of conscience as the only voice, so also prayer to God in secret creates the silence we need to begin to hear the voice of God in our own personal existence. Kierkegaard describes the experience of a person who had so much of importance to

61 62 63 64 65 66 67

FSE, 91. WL, 51. UDVS, 129. JP 4:4148, p. 153 / SKS 20, NB5:113, p. 417. JP 4:3987, p. 100 / SKS 22, NB13:73, pp. 317–18. JP 5:5949, p. 353 / SKS 20, NB:71, pp. 62–3. JP 6:5949, pp. 132–3 / SKS 21, NB10:105, pp. 310–11.

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say to God that he was afraid he was going to forget something as he prayed, and so he prayed to God with all his heart, using his language to address God directly. Then what happened to him as he really did pray with all his heart? Something amazing happened to him. Gradually, as he became more and more fervent in prayer, he had less and less to say, and finally he became completely silent. He became silent. Indeed, he became what is, if possible, even more opposite to speaking than silence; he became a listener. He thought that to pray was to speak; he learned that to pray is not only to be silent but is to listen. And so it is; to pray is not to listen to oneself speak but it is to become silent and to remain silent, to wait until the one praying hears God.68 We learn to use language according to Christianity when we use it to pray to God in secret, and by praying to God in secret we learn how to become silent, so that in the silence we can begin to hear the voice of God. Kierkegaard insists that we can begin to be freed from the self-deception brought about by our use of language when we learn to be silent. Silence not only teaches us to listen to the voice of God, as the culmination of our effort to speak to and confide in God, but it also allows us to see what our lives actually express, freed from the self-deceptive mask of language. The police thoroughly frisk suspicious persons. If the mobs of speakers, teachers, professors etc. were to be thoroughly frisked in the same way, it would no doubt become a complicated criminal affair. To give them a thorough frisking – yes, to strip them of the clothing, the changes of clothing, and the disguises of language, to frisk them by ordering them to be silent, saying: Shut up, and let us see what your life expresses, for once let this be the speaker who says who you are.69 Kierkegaard therefore commends the method of Pythagoras, who began his training of others with years of silence, for it allows us to see ourselves without the deceptive disguise of language. There are many teachers of silence, with prayer in secret being one of the most important. But there is also the natural world, and the lily and the bird in particular, whom Christ has appointed to be our teachers of silence. ‘Oh, but would that the Gospel, with the help of the lily and the bird, might teach you, my listener, earnestness, and teach me to make you completely silent before God!’70 Kierkegaard thought that God also appointed women to us to teach us silence, how to become silent, and he thereby placed a very positive meaning on Paul’s injunction on women to keep silence in church. Far from seeing this instruction as placing women below men, Kierkegaard insists that this appoints women as the teachers of men, for men deceive themselves by their love of talking, whereas they can learn to be silent from women. ‘It takes an utterly extraordinary superiority for a man to call men to silence by his presence, whereas within her own boundaries, in her own sphere, any woman can do it if she – not selfishly but humbly serving a higher aim – wills it.’71 Kierkegaard thought that women gain their greatest power, and perform their greatest service, when they learn silence and teach silence.72

68 69 70 71 72

WA, 12. JP 3:2334, p. 12 / SKS 22, NB13:59, p. 310. WA, 18. FSE, 48. FSE, 48.

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Lock Your Door and Read the Word of God to Yourself Silence on the other side of language brings us into the presence of God, and allows us to hear the voice of conscience and the voice of God in a way that is impossible in the cacophony of human speaking. Once his reader becomes accustomed to locking her door and speaking to herself by the use of Kierkegaard’s discourses, and to locking her door and speaking to and ultimately listening to God in silence, Kierkegaard thinks that the reader is ready to read the Word of God in the proper way.73 The language of Christianity, which is the language of the New Testament, can only be heard aright when I read it aloud to myself after I have locked the door of my room, so that I am all alone with the Word of God and my conscience. ‘There is [er til] a God; his will is made known to me in Holy Scripture and in my conscience.’74 By doing so, I bring myself under obligation to what I read, without thinking about or consulting with anyone else. ‘Truth is not trying to get a random bunch of people obligated to me or to my conception. Truth is that it become known that there is a book called the New Testament and that everyone must alone by himself before God become obligated by it.’75 Kierkegaard emphasizes reading the New Testament to ourselves, because he sees the Old Testament as teaching the divinely sanctioned enjoyment of life, and it is precisely this teaching that Christ voluntarily renounces. ‘But Judaism is divinely sanctioned optimism, sheer promise for this life. And simply because Christianity is renunciation, Judaism is its presupposition: Opposita juxta se posita. Renunciation can never be as radical as when it has divinely authorized optimism in the foreground.’76 Christendom perverts the language of the Gospel by equating the Old Testament with the New, thereby combining Israel’s divinely sanctioned enjoyment of life with the Gospel’s hope for eternity. Kierkegaard thinks that the only way to free ourselves from this delusion is to read the New Testament in light of its renunciation of the divinely sanctioned enjoyment of life in the Old Testament. Once I read the New Testament to myself, I must consult with God in prayer, to make sure I have understood what God is saying personally to me, to my conscience. This again takes place in the silence and solitude of my room, with the door securely locked so that no one may interrupt me. The goal of such reading is action, which is precisely why my reading must be directed towards my conscience. When I open the door, I must express what I have heard not by what I say – for I am to remain silent – but by what I do. ‘It is quite simple. Take the New Testament – lock your door, talk with God, pray – and then do what it says simply and plainly in the New Testament, actualize it by expressing it existentially – this is Christianity.’77 Here again we must resist another temptation to which Christendom continually succumbs, which is to read the New Testament and then consult with other human beings regarding what it might mean. Once this happens, we lose the impression of the Word of God, and it loses its authority over our conscience.

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74 75 76 77

See Timothy Houston Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997); Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart, eds, Kierkegaard and the Bible: Tome II: The New Testament. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 1: tome II (London: Routledge, 2016). JP 2:1960, pp. 385–6 / SKS 24, NB22:44, p. 129. JP 2:1960, pp. 385–6 / SKS 24, NB22:44, p. 129. JP 4:2224, p. 32 / SKS 25, NB29:90, p. 348. JP 3:3014, pp. 358–9 / SKS 22, NB11:97, p. 55.

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But men found it too rigorous to live this way (not to jabber about it on Sunday). Crafty as human nature always is, instead of holding to God – something every person can and ought to do – they made out that it is well-pleasing to God, it is humility, modesty, and cordiality to prattle together among themselves about what Christianity is, thereby setting aside the sovereignty of Christianity.78 The problem is made worse by the biblical scholarship of theology professors, for they raise doubts about the meaning of Scripture and reduce the impression it makes on our conscience. They think, ‘To want to open the N.T., to understand what one reads there as an out-and-out order, to promptly act accordingly – what a mistake! No, the N.T. is a doctrine, and scientific scholarship is required to understand it!’79 In order to resist this temptation, if I have any questions about what I read, I must consult with God in prayer, for after all it is God’s Word that I am reading. But I must remain silent in the presence of other people, and let my existence do the speaking. ‘As for the question: What is Christianity? – it is God’s will that each man relate himself before God to Holy Scripture in this matter, and in particular God does not want all this chattering and prattling between man and man.’80 My refusal to consult with anyone other than God, which I have learned to do by praying to God in secret, is the only way to read the New Testament properly, for only in this way will it exert its authority over my conscience, and hold me personally accountable to act according to the voice of God that I hear. ‘The very moment I talk with anyone else about that which is supreme to me, about what God’s will with me is, at that very same moment God’s power over me is diminished.’81

Act on the Word of God in Silent Obedience When I act in silent obedience to the voice of God and my own conscience, I will quickly find that I am brought into a collision with the secular world in which I used to have my existence. ‘Christ says: Do according to what I say – and you shall know. Consequently, decisive action first of all. By acting your life will come into collision with all existence [Tilværelsen].’82 Kierkegaard is convinced that only when I act in silence on the basis of what I have heard alone in my room will I be able to break the spell created by the misuse of Christian language in Christendom.83 If I obey the command of Christ to sell my possessions and give to the poor, I will lose my livelihood and my reputation, and my friends and family will think that I have gone mad. If I love my neighbour as myself, and love my enemies who hate me, the members of my former alliances, be they family, church or nation, will think that I am a traitor to their cause, because I am willing to love those who do not love us. Most importantly, if I am poor and suffering, and turn to the Gospel for the consolation that it offers, because it tells me that I in particular am loved by God, I learn to my horror that to be loved by God means to suffer in this life, so that the more I am loved, the more I suffer. ‘You are suffering. Alas, to whom shall a person flee but to God? O, but here it comes: the more you become involved with God, the more

78 79 80 81 82 83

JP 3:3019, p. 361 / SKS 24, NB21:55, p. 41. JP 3:2872, p. 272 / SKS 23, NB17:102, pp. 241–3. JP 3:2872, p. 272 / SKS 23, NB17:102, pp. 241–3. JP 2:1960, pp. 385–6 / SKS 24, NB22:44, p. 129. JP 2:1902, pp. 346–7 / SKS 24, NB24:100, pp. 381–2. JP 3:3655, p. 693 / SKS 22, NB14:32, pp. 362–3.

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certain is the suffering. You wanted God’s help to get rid of suffering – and suffering came right along with the God-relationship.’84 By acting in silence out of obedience to the voice of God you have heard in secret, you will encounter in your own existence the two great paradoxes of Christianity: first, that it is precisely the poor and suffering who are loved by God, even though they are unloved by other people; and second, that because you are loved by God, you must suffer even more, and this suffering will not end until you die.85 Only when your bond to the secular world is broken by your silent obedience to the Gospel will you learn the true meaning of Christian language. You will learn in particular that what the world calls love is really an alliance of self-love, be it as small an alliance as a marriage or as large as a global church. You will also learn that to love God and to be loved by God is to be hated by the world.86 However, so long as you continue to confide in and consult with God in prayer, you can experience the way that your suffering will increase and intensify your intimacy with God, so that when you are suffering opposition you are no longer even speaking to your persecutors, but to God. And when this happens, you can actually see how it is possible to obey Jesus when he tells you to bless those who curse you and to love those who hate you. ‘Now consider the Christian at the moment he is most blissfully aware of his fellowship with God and has to confess that he nevertheless owes a good share of it to his persecutors – then to say: I will forgive them, I am not angry with them – how unfestive – no: I bless them.’87

The One Who Is Spirit Uses Christian Language Correctly The ability to rejoice when persecuted, to love when hated, and to bless when cursed, reveals that one has truly become spirit. One who is spirit still uses the same words that others use, but he realizes that the meaning of these words has been inverted: what we simplemindedly and whiningly call loss is gain, what the world rebelliously calls shame is honor; thus what the world childishly calls downfall is victory; thus the language a whole race speaks with unanimous agreement is still turned upside down, and there is only one single human being who speaks the human language correctly, he whom the whole human race is unanimous in thrusting away from itself.88 With this realization, the recovery of genuinely Christian language is now complete.

III. KIERKEGAARD’S CONTINUING CHALLENGE TO ACADEMY AND CHURCH Kierkegaard claims that the promise of Christian language is attained when the individual believer uses it to address God in the midst of her voluntary suffering for the sake of the Gospel, which allows her to forgive, love and bless her enemies, and even to boast of and rejoice in her sufferings. As stated at the beginning of this chapter, Kierkegaard was well aware that he had not attained to this ideal himself, even at the end of his life when he

84 85 86 87 88

JP 4:4700, p. 423 / SKS 25, NB27:80, pp. 194–5. JP 4:4688, p. 412 / SKS 25, NB26:44, p. 49. WL, 119. JP 4:4648, pp. 393–4 / SKS 23, NB16:44, pp. 125–6. UDVS, 333.

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launched what has been called his ‘attack on Christendom’. In his last contribution to this attack, which was never published due to his death shorty after writing it, he claims once again that he is not a Christian, and hence does not actualize the promise of Christian language in his own life or work. However, he does claim to know the suffering that the love of God caused in his life. ‘This I know, and I also know what it has cost, what I have suffered, which can be expressed by a single line: I was never like the others.’89 He did learn to speak to God in prayer from the midst of this lifelong suffering, not to rejoice that he had been considered worthy to suffer for the sake of Christ, as the apostles had done, but rather to thank God’s infinite love for making his life such a sacrifice, by keeping him from ever being like the others. And were God ever to ask him if he felt that he should complain about the way God treated him, embittering his life from his youth onwards, Kierkegaard would say, ‘No, no, Infinite Love’, while also noting that others would respond to God by saying ‘Thanks for nothing’ were they to have suffered such agonies.90 Kierkegaard’s analysis of the change of meaning in Christian language by theology professors and pastors, and his guidance for the restoration of that meaning by means of reading and praying in solitude, silence and suffering, reveal the peril and promise of Christian language as much in our own day as in his own. In particular, Kierkegaard represents a very deep and categorical challenge to the way we want to do theology in the academy. As is clear from the preceding discussion, his prescription for the recovery of genuinely Christian language is formulated on the basis of his insistence that every human being is called to be a disciple of Christ, and not just those studying for the ministry or those training to be professors of theology. ‘God says, have I not had it proclaimed that every man, unconditionally every man, can turn to me – and therefore that other persons can certainly do it as well.’91 He did not set forth his ideal of Christian language only for students of theology in the university or the seminary, but rather for every person who is called to follow Christ. This is why he situates the recovery of genuine Christian language in the solitude and silence of my room, and not in the lecture hall or seminar room in the seminary or university. So the first thing to be said about the challenge he presents to theological education is that he insists that we remember that everyone both can and should pursue the recovery of Christian language by reading and obeying Scripture in solitude and silence, without consulting with others. He would never limit this vision to the select few who pursue theological education as their profession – in fact, he thought that this limitation contributed to the degradation of Christian language. Everyone can pray to God alone in their room, as Jesus taught us to do in the Sermon on the Mount, and everyone can understand and obey the command of Jesus to die to the world in order to live to God. The problem is not with the understanding, but with the will. Each of us can and must decide to follow him, for each of us is called to be a disciple of Christ. What of those of us with the misfortune of having our careers in the academic study of theology? Speaking only for myself, my previous appropriation of the understanding of theology as ‘faith seeking understanding’ has been radically called into question by Kierkegaard’s insight that faith seeks to transform my life, not to increase my understanding. I have a tendency to read Scripture in order to formulate a theory about 89 90 91

TM, 344. TM, 345. JP 4:3987, p. 100 / SKS 22, NB13:73, pp. 317–18.

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the economy of salvation described therein, and I seek to get others to agree with my theory. If Kierkegaard is correct, I should read Scripture by myself to myself, to learn how God is addressing me, and only me, here and now; and then I should apply what I hear from God to my own life, and let my life proclaim what I have heard. Kierkegaard also calls into question my earlier confidence that the objective preaching of the Word of God is all that is needed in the church, following the example of Martin Luther and Karl Barth. Kierkegaard sees the Word of God as best appropriated when I am alone in a room, in the context of my own intimate relationship with God, and not when it is proclaimed loudly and dramatically before a large congregation. Indeed, much of Kierkegaard’s effort is directed towards encouraging me to develop my intimate relationship with myself, so that I might thereby be able to develop an intimate relationship with God. This is why I need to go into the room and lock my door, and read his words to myself. No one else can become responsible for my relationship to myself, and no one else can be responsible for developing my intimate relationship with God. Kierkegaard reminds me that the greatest privilege we have as human beings is the ability to appeal directly to God in prayer. The transformation of Christian language that he sought takes place precisely by means of my use of language first in speaking to myself, and then in speaking to God in the solitude and silence of my room. Each of us is called to develop his or her own unique relationship with God, and no one can or ought to do this for us. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s attention to the way the Word of God is meant to awaken and inform my conscience challenges me to seek to become more and more transparent to myself in the presence of God. Moreover, by asking me to read Scripture in light of my conscience, rather than in light of my understanding, Kierkegaard has brought me to see all those places in the gospels where Jesus tells me that the way I treat others determines the way God will treat me. I will be forgiven by God if I forgive others who have wronged me. I will be a beloved child of God if I love my enemies. I will be forgiven much if I love much. All things will work for good if I love God. Kierkegaard has also taken all of the fun out of judging others by reminding me that the judgement I give will be the judgement I get. I seldom if ever hear these texts highlighted in Protestant worship or theology, and I owe it to Kierkegaard for having planted them deeply in my conscience. Finally, his insight that the Gospel is meant for the poor and suffering, and should be proclaimed only by those who are voluntarily poor and suffering, is unarguably and devastatingly true. Kierkegaard has taught me to try to see suffering as a sign of God’s love and therefore as an opportunity to develop a more deeply intimate relationship with God. He is also correct in showing me the real scandal of the Gospel, for Jesus Christ does not seek to alleviate suffering but rather to intensify it, so that one who believes the Gospel suffers more because she believes than she did before she heard the Gospel. The increased isolation of the believer, and her inability to make herself understood by others in the midst of her voluntary suffering, means she can only appeal to God for comfort and understanding, and not to other human beings, thereby intensifying her intimate relationship with God. But paradoxically, the way her suffering increases her intimacy with God is precisely why she can not only forgive those who cause her suffering but also love and bless them. The vocation I have pursued – to teach theology as a professional career, with a good salary, benefits and unbeatable job security – is quite the opposite of this vision, and I owe it to Kierkegaard for never letting me forget this. As he says, a professor of theology is someone who has a good career because someone else was crucified. It is no wonder that no theologian has really followed his lead, including the author of this chapter, for if I did

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I would focus on obeying the Word of God in solitude, silence and voluntary suffering, speaking directly to God in prayer, and not to others about the poetic productions of Søren Kierkegaard.

FURTHER READING Fenves, Peter. ‘Chatter’: Language and History in Kierkegaard. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Kirmmse, Bruce H. Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Shakespeare, Steven. Kierkegaard, Language, and the Reality of God. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Walsh, Sylvia. Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Kierkegaard on Doctrine: The Grammar of Christian Pathos LEE C. BARRETT

I. THE PUZZLEMENT ABOUT ‘DOCTRINE’ IN KIERKEGAARD’S AUTHORSHIP The degree to which Kierkegaard’s authorship assumes a normative role for Christian doctrines has long been debated, often with considerable acrimony. The recurrent interpretative controversies are by no means trivial, for they have far-reaching implications for the issue of the basic nature and purpose of Kierkegaard’s entire literature. Nothing less is at stake than the question of whether or not his writings were intended in some way to be a clarification of the Christian faith. Many interpreters of Kierkegaard have claimed to detect a radical incommensurability between the basic thrust of his authorship and the authoritative status of Christian doctrines. Most of these anti-doctrinal readings of Kierkegaard implicitly presuppose a very particular definition of ‘doctrine’. They assume that doctrines function as assertions that refer to alleged transcendent states of affairs, make objective truth claims about them and demand cognitive assent; doctrines are intended to be propositions that correspond to supersensible realities. According to this understanding of doctrine, once the theological formulae have been adequately articulated, they are usually organized into a logically coherent system. Doctrinal theology, then, is the codification of a set of fundamental propositions. This view of doctrine usually includes the addendum that these systematically arranged propositions are intended to be taken as normative by an ecclesial body. In the light of this understanding of doctrine, it is not surprising that many expositors of Kierkegaard have discounted the possibility that Kierkegaard could have entertained any real doctrinal interests. Inevitably, the conclusion has often been reached that doctrines, as defined above, are incompatible with the nature and purpose of Kierkegaard’s texts. Given what Kierkegaard says about the nature of religious language and the life of faith, he could not possibly have approved of doctrine. This widespread conviction that Kierkegaard could not have been sympathetic to doctrinal matters is based on a variety of different considerations concerning Kierkegaard’s authorship which must be carefully distinguished and considered. According to many Kierkegaard scholars, the ‘literary’ character of his work precludes any serious doctrinal interest. Doctrines, it is claimed, attempt to employ precise and stable concepts, ideally with univocal meanings, in order to refer accurately to transcendent facts, while literary works, including Kierkegaard’s writings, use metaphors,

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images, narratives and other equivocal literary tropes in order to open up a plurality of interpretative horizons. Imaginative discourse like Kierkegaard’s is not in the least bit conducive to the definitiveness that doctrinal instruction requires. Metaphors and evocative images subvert the cohesion of a text and the author’s alleged control of its meaning; such multivocity would be fatal for doctrinal precision. Moreover, the prevalence of irony, humour, pseudonymity and other destabilizing rhetorical devices in Kierkegaard’s works militate against the transparent didactic and assertoric force of doctrine. Kierkegaard’s strategies of indirection invite the reader to explore a polyphony of meanings, while doctrines affirm one univocal truth. Therefore, if doctrine is the stipulation of specific and definitive teachings, then Kierkegaard’s main purposes could not have included doctrinal instruction. Along these lines Louis Mackey famously insisted that Kierkegaard’s authorship could not be read as a compendium of convictions, either philosophical or theological, for Kierkegaard insisted that he was not a purveyor of authoritative teachings.1 Similarly, according to Roger Poole, Kierkegaard’s writings are fluid, kaleidoscopic and riddled with disconcerting anomalies that undermine the closure and stability that doctrines presumably require.2 Kierkegaard’s presentation of Christian themes is so disrupted by sudden changes of topic and ambiguous analogies that it deconstructs itself, thwarting the synoptic and systematic elaboration that one would expect from a doctrinal theology. His authorship is not a doctrinal textbook but a dynamic skein of shifting intertextual associations. Michael Strawser has argued that Kierkegaard’s strategies of indirection reveal his sensitivity to the chasm between language and the immediacy of experience; the elusiveness of all linguistic meaning frustrates the desire for doctrinal finality.3 Developing this trajectory, Steven Shakespeare agreed that the immediacy of faith cannot be directly expressed in writing, and therefore the definitiveness that doctrines need is rendered impossible.4 Other authors assert that the obligatory force of doctrines is incompatible with Kierkegaard’s desire to encourage the responsibility of the reader for her own interpretations and her own religious life. His multivocity forces his readers to make their own interpretative decisions rather than appropriate his works as a set of transparent assertions. Doctrines presuppose the certifying authority of a magisterium, but Kierkegaard sought to help the individual to stand alone before God. According to Kierkegaard, the pathos that must accompany all religious communication requires risk, and risk requires an absence of closure. Doctrines, however, terminate uncertainty, resolve ambiguities and inhibit the individual’s striving to make meaning. The interpretative stability associated with doctrines would militate against the reader’s struggle to make sense of the enigmas and tensions in the religious life, and would foster an impersonal abstraction from life’s concrete, first-person challenges.5 Surely, such critics argue, Kierkegaard could not have been promoting stable certitudes, for he stalwartly resisted the transmutation of subjectivity into the objectivities of Christendom. The ossification of passionate inwardness into reified dogmas would be absolutely contrary to Kierkegaard’s celebrated foregrounding

1 2 3

4 5

Louis Mackey, Points of View: Readings of Kierkegaard (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986). Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993). Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997). Steven Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Language, and the Reality of God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Michael Weston, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994).

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of the ‘how’ of faith rather than the ‘what’.6 Kierkegaard, they claim, would not allow the abstractions of doctrine to undermine the risk and uncertainty with which individuals must wrestle in the particular, concrete circumstances of their lives. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s critique of Christendom’s stultifying conformity and complacent ideological assurance would rule out the closure that doctrines promise. According to these interpreters, language that sounds doctrinal in Kierkegaard’s works is really a covert gambit in a broader strategy of existential provocation. According to other Kierkegaard scholars, it is the sheer otherness of God to which Christianity points that precludes the possibility of grasping that elusive ineffability in a conceptual formula. Doctrines, and perhaps even theistic language itself, may be a misguided and idolatrous effort to naturalize and domesticate absolute alterity. The otherness towards which Kierkegaard gestures cannot be mastered and controlled by orthodox formulae, and Kierkegaard must have realized that.7 If Kierkegaard was a theologian at all, he was a very apophatic one. But many other expositors have seen Kierkegaard’s authorship as being, at least in part, a clarification and revitalization of the grand doctrinal themes of Christianity. Along these lines Per Lønning discerned in Kierkegaard’s pages a set of doctrinal themes basically consistent with the confessional standards of Lutheranism.8 In the English-speaking world Paul Sponheim and later Daphne Hampson have pointed out Kierkegaard’s profound indebtedness to historic Lutheran orthodoxy (as well as his modifications of it).9 Arnold Come has emphasized the importance of Kierkegaard’s use of a ‘dialectic of concepts’ to communicate the faith, and, in so doing, recast many Christian doctrines.10 The present author and David Gouwens have argued that Kierkegaard’s work is amenable to a theological reading as long as the interpreter is sensitive to the significance of his literary strategies.11 Sylvia Walsh agrees that Kierkegaard used his poetic abilities to illumine the ways that Christian concepts can inform the dynamics of the Christian life.12 Similarly, Murray Rae and David R. Law have interpreted Kierkegaard’s work in the light of a variety of traditional theological themes, particularly the doctrines of God, Christ and salvation.13 The second reason for raising questions about the role of doctrines in Kierkegaard’s work is that his explicit remarks about the concept ‘doctrine’ (Lære or sometimes Doctrin) and his less frequently used term ‘dogma’ (Dogme or Bestemmelse) are often cryptic and seem to point in divergent directions. He tends to use ‘doctrine’ and ‘dogma’ interchangeably, sometimes employing them in the same passage.14 Although ‘dogma’ often has a

6 7 8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Benjamin Daise, Kierkegaard’s Socratic Art (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999). John Llewelyn, Margins of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). Per Lønning, Samtidighedens Situation: en studie i Søren Kierkegaards Kristendomsforståelse (Oslo: Forlaget Land og Kirke, 1954). Paul Sponheim, Kierkegaard on Christ and Christian Coherence (London: SCM Press, 1968); Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering Myself (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). Lee C. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013); David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Sylvia Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Murray Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2010); David R. Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). JFY, 195 / SKS 16, 242.

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stronger nuance of authority in his pages, both words point to the core convictions of an individual or community, even secular ones. Sometimes he uses these terms in a critical, pejorative sense, and sometimes in an approbative way. This ambivalence is evident in every dimension of his writing, including the pseudonymous literature, his signed works and his journals. Frequently, Kierkegaard did give voice to what sound like sweeping condemnations of doctrine. For example, his journals contain scathing remarks like ‘But good Lord, Christianity is no “doctrine” ’15 and ‘dogmatics as a whole is a misunderstanding, especially as it has now been developed’.16 Anti-Climacus repeats this complaint, asserting that ‘Christianity is no doctrine; all talk of offense in regard to it as doctrine is a misunderstanding’.17 Under his own name Kierkegaard insists that Christ did not teach doctrines but offered himself to individuals.18 He writes that ‘the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ, did not bring any doctrine into the world and never delivered a lecture’.19 Throughout his authorship specific doctrines are singled out for opprobrium. For example, Anti-Climacus laments that the doctrine of sin in general has been invented in order to distract attention from the gravity of the individual’s own guilt.20 Similarly, the doctrine of the atonement mitigates the offensiveness of the shocking spectacle of the crucified Jesus.21 Kierkegaard’s anti-doctrine animus is further suggested by the fact that he regularly and vehemently denounced pastors and professors who expounded doctrines and misrepresented Christianity as a network of objective propositions. Kierkegaard recoils in disgust when ‘a preacher prides himself on teaching what is orthodox or when he is busy looking for more precise definitions against those who believe in another way’.22 He laments that ‘people have completely transferred Christianity from being an existencecommunication (Existents-Meddelelse) to being a doctrine’.23 Repeatedly he warns that the affirmation of the doctrinal content of Christianity does not qualify a person as a Christian. Concerning the kingdom of God, professors dupe the ‘unlearned man by giving him the idea that it depends on doctrine’.24 In his notes for undelivered lectures on communication Kierkegaard condemns the clergy’s identification of Christian faith with the ability to repeat doctrinal formulae in a systematic manner. Christian faith is not the sort of thing that can be communicated didactically as if it were nothing but a set of cognitive propositions. Sometimes he even suggests that doctrines do not have any ‘objective’ meaning that homiletical eloquence could communicate.25 His distaste for philosophical systems and speculation spills over into an antipathy towards theological systems and those who propagate them. Academic theology, he claims, is nothing but flatulence disguised as ersatz profundity.26 Theological professors deliberately obscure the meaning of biblical texts so that the decision to obey their message can be indefinitely postponed.27 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

JP 3:2870, p. 269 / SKS 23, NB17:101, p. 240. JP 1:627, p. 257 / SKS 18, JJ:305, p. 236. PC, 106 / SKS 12, 88–9. JFY, 191 / SKS 16, 238. JFY, 209 / SKS 16, 254. PC, 68 / SKS 12, 80. PC, 106 / SKS 12, 88–9. JP 1:660, p. 309 / SKS 21, NB6:45, p. 35. JP 1:676, p. 316 / SKS 22, NB13:77, p. 320. JP 4:3870, p. 23 / SKS 26, NB33:42, p. 283. JFY, 126 / SKS 12, 88–9. KJN 6, 52 / SKS 22, NB11:98, p. 56. FSE, 34 / SKS 13, 61.

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On the other hand, Kierkegaard often praised the inherited doctrines of the church. He states in his journals that ‘on the whole the doctrine as it is presented is entirely sound’.28 Also in his journals he comments that ‘the doctrine in the established church and its organization are very good’.29 In print Kierkegaard echoed these sentiments, asserting that ‘Lutheran doctrine is excellent, is the truth’.30 Even his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis praised the Lutheran confessions and disavowed any project of doctrinal revision.31 Even more importantly, many of Kierkegaard’s texts presuppose the validity of certain major Christian doctrines. The Concept of Anxiety assumes the doctrine of original sin, and Philosophical Fragments assumes the doctrines of revelation and the incarnation. Needless to say, his Christian discourses and most of his edifying ones are, at least in part, elaborations of themes associated with major doctrines. To take just one obvious example, his Discourses for the Communion on Fridays presuppose the validity of church teachings about the significance of the Eucharist. Moreover, Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms often expressed a commitment to doctrinal orthodoxy. Climacus claims that Philosophical Fragments was intended to present ‘old fashioned orthodoxy in its rightful severity’.32 Kierkegaard advises that while the ruminations of philosophers about Christ are not in the least bit edifying, those of the ‘dogmaticians’ are indeed spiritually valuable.33 He observes that the ‘old Christian dogmatic terminology’ is like an enchanted castle that ‘needs only to be awakened’.34 Moreover, Kierkegaard praises people who have ‘suffered for the doctrine’, implying that the doctrine is something eminently worth suffering for.35 In a more polemical vein he cautions that theological students are in danger of succumbing to the blandishments of Hegelianism unless they have ‘the full marching equipment of orthodoxy’.36 Part of his critique of Magister Adler was that the poor misguided man was not properly trained in the proper employment of authoritative Christian concepts.37

II. THE DUAL USES OF ‘DOCTRINE’ In spite of these ostensibly contradictory remarks about doctrine, Kierkegaard need not be dismissed as hopelessly confused or conflicted. The interpreter is not forced to choose between Kierkegaard the evocative, elusive poet and Kierkegaard the rigid dogmatician, or between Kierkegaard the anti-doctrinal champion of subjectivity and Kierkegaard the pro-doctrinal defender of orthodoxy. I will argue that a certain sense can be made of the discrepancies among Kierkegaard’s statements about doctrine. I will also contend that his approach to doctrine signals a radical reimagining of the way that theology should be done, for he gives new prominence to the rhetorical and passional features of theological communication. As we shall see, ters are right that Kierkegaard’s rhetorical strategies of indirection and provocation must be taken into account, but the ‘theological’ interpreters

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

JP 6:6702, p. 362 / SKS 24, NB22:23, p. 117. JP 6:6727, p. 377 / SKS 24, NB23:33, p. 221. FSE, 24 / SKS 13, 52. CA, 26–7 / SKS 4, 333–4. CUP, 275 / SKS 7, 249. WA, 58 / SKS 11, 64. KJN 1, p. 218 / SKS 17, DD:20, p. 250. JFY, 207 / SKS 16, 253. BA, 93 / SKS 15, 250. BA, 89 / SKP VIII 2 B 7:11, p. 11.

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are also right that his authorship can be read as a commentary on almost the whole spectrum of Christian doctrines. The source of the confusion about Kierkegaard’s discrepant remarks is that he used the concept ‘doctrine’ in two very different ways. Kierkegaard’s first way of using ‘doctrine’ was to critique the contemporary church’s pervasive tendency to abstract theological formulae from the cultivation of Christian forms of passion and action. In these contexts ‘doctrine’ is a pejorative term. He complains that in the contemporary church ‘theory, doctrine, is there to hide the fact that practice is wanting’.38 He inveighs against construals of doctrine as passion-neutral propositions making truth claims about God, humanity, salvation and everything else. ‘Doctrine’ in the negative sense suggests treating Christian convictions as if they were bits of data or ideational objects to be scrutinized, analysed and justified. Theology is thereby transmuted into something scientific and speculative, and attention is diverted away from the quality of the individual’s own life. Such an objective attitude suggests that the purpose of Christianity is to become more precisely orthodox through the development of more refined theological concepts arranged in more rigorously logical patterns. The alleged believer functions as a scientific observer and neutral evaluator, detached from her own life. Concepts like ‘sin’ and ‘atonement,’ which should be used with selfinvolving passion, become conceptual objects external to the individual. For Kierkegaard, this clinical detachment is demonic. If doctrines (in this propositional sense) are invidious, systems of doctrine are even worse. Kierkegaard’s critique of doctrinal systems is parallel to his more celebrated aversion to metaphysical schemas. Kierkegaard found the construal of theology as a propositional system to be as repugnant as the interpretation of philosophy as a speculative encyclopedia that explains all phenomena. Systems of doctrine intellectualize and objectify Christianity. This counterproductive systematizing project usually involves situating doctrines in a metaphysical, historical or psychological conceptuality in order to clarify them and display the logical relations among them. Kierkegaard lambasts theological systems in order to resist the transmutation of potentially transformative Christian teachings into mere ciphers in an abstract theological calculus. All such speculative endeavours cast the individual in the role of the neutral scientific analyst, categorizing and manipulating the data from a safe position of mastery. Kierkegaard’s subversive and destabilizing literary strategies were antidotes to this smugly dispassionate and disengaged effort to systematize doctrine. According to Kierkegaard, the tendency to treat doctrines in a detached manner was exacerbated by the passionlessness that characterized Christendom in what Kierkegaard called ‘the present age’. The surrender of individual responsibility to the collectivity fosters an atmosphere of unreflective conformity to group opinion. Part of this conformity is the illusion that individuals know what doctrines mean because theological language is used in familiar and predictable ways by their fellow citizens. In this spiritually degenerate culture individuals merely mimic the linguistic practice of their neighbours. The present age is plagued by the tragic reality that Christian doctrines have passed into general cultural usage and have thereby been trivialized and domesticated. As a result, all moderately decent citizens assume that they are speaking the language of faith meaningfully, and that they are leading Christianly significant lives by virtue of their participation in the common ethos. They can harbour the comforting illusion that they are Christians

38

JP 4:3870, p. 22 / SKS 26, NB33:42, p. 282.

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because doctrinal language has been adapted to the environing culture and rendered innocuous. In this process of devolving into mere social conformists, individuals never realize that Christian concepts are intended to inform their own passional development in potentially disruptive ways. The fact that growth in the Christian life demands rigorous and often painful self-reflection and transformation is entirely obscured. In the present age, the universal human tendency to escape from self-responsibility has been augmented by popular journalism’s creation of a faceless and amorphous ‘public’ and by the unholy alliance of the church, the state and the general culture. Kierkegaard rebukes this sensibility, warning that it is a corporate self-deception in which ‘concepts cease’ and ‘the language is confused’.39 Doctrinal discourse must be chastened and destabilized in order to jolt the denizens of Christendom out of their linguistic complacency. The illusion that the entire culture knows full well what Christian doctrines mean is a formidable obstacle to genuine Christian faith and must be dispelled. Kierkegaard chastised those groups who imagined that the waning of faith could be remedied by more doctrinal precision and uniformity. For example, he criticized the followers of Andreas Rudelbach, who demanded strict adherence to the Lutheran confessional documents. This hyper-orthodox party erroneously identified Christianity with cognitive assent to propositions, rather than with passion, and with precise definitions rather than with transformed lives. Such advocates of orthodox doctrine were guilty of multiplying ‘ridiculous hair-splitting sophistries’.40 He was equally unsympathetic to the followers of Nicolai F. S. Grundtvig who wanted to root spiritual assurance in the divine authority of the Apostles’ Creed. Grundtvig sought to remove the risk of faith through appeals to the direct recognizability of the divine in the creedal documents of the church. Both groups, he complained, shirked the task of living out the faith and avoided the inconveniences of evangelism and martyrdom. Confident in their adherence to precisely defined doctrinal truths, they both fell prey to self-righteousness and sectarianism, confusing themselves with the apostolic church.41 Their theological literalism petrified authentic religious subjectivity and evaded the cultivation of inwardness. In this way an ecclesial faction’s insistence upon strict standards of doctrinal orthodoxy was symptomatic of spiritual cowardice. Kierkegaard also complained that there is another way in which doctrines can be misused. He castigated the widespread but superficial devotion to orthodox doctrines that was nothing but ‘nonsense, mediocrity, tripe, and balderdash, playing at Christianity, and living in platitudes’.42 Doctrines, he warned, can be employed nostalgically to instil a false sense of cosy intimacy with God, removing the possibility of offence and passionate inwardness. Climacus laments, ‘It is always just as sad that someone under the guise of orthodoxy wants to make Christianity into moonlight and charity school sentimentality.’43 For example, the doctrine of unmerited grace can be twisted to suggest a divine avuncular affection that makes no demands on individuals and coddles them like innocent children. This type of sentimental religiosity is really an immature longing for childhood comforts and ‘the loving tenderness of a pious mother’.44

39 40 41 42 43 44

JP 1:654, p. 293 / SKS 27, Papir 369, p. 415. JP 3:3047, p. 379 / SKP V B 1, p. 54. JP 1:580, p. 236 / SKS 27, Papir 34, pp. 85–6. JP 3:2903, p. 289 / SKS 25, NB29:58, p. 329. CUP, 593 / SKS 7, 539. CUP, 598 / SKS 7, 543.

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Over against these negative senses of ‘doctrine’, Kierkegaard uses the concept in a much more approbative way. In this alternative use, doctrines are not reducible to mere assertions of cognitive propositions. Instead of being used vacuously to provide information about supernatural matters, doctrines can be used to sketch the contours of a radically new way of life and make possible the development of authentically Christian forms of pathos. For Kierkegaard, doctrines only have genuine significance when they are embedded in passionate concern for the quality of one’s own life, and not in the dispassionate pursuit of knowledge. Grasping the meaning of a doctrine minimally requires the ability to imagine the distinctive passional qualities that characterize a unique manner of existing and to discern its implications for one’s own life. To understand a doctrine, individuals must be enabled to imagine the concerns and passions appropriate to it, experience them as possibilities for their own selves and imaginatively feel their attractions and repulsions. For example, a person cannot understand statements about ‘God’ without imagining the hopes and fears that typically attend talk about God, or without appreciating the activities of praising, confessing and beseeching in which the concept ‘God’ has a natural home. Having imagined such a pathos-laden way of life, the individual could then be moved to cultivate the new passions and dispositions, or, offended by that unsettling prospect, reject them. Fully understanding a doctrine in the deepest sense requires the willingness to pursue these new patterns of thinking, acting and feeling. Kierkegaard summarizes these points by claiming that the purpose of doctrinal instruction is to enable the individual to reconfigure her own life.45 He often describes this as the acquiring of a new capacity, a new skill. As such, learning a doctrine is more like learning to engage in a new activity than it is like digesting bits of information. In this drama of personal transformation, clinical detachment and bourgeois complacency have no place. Kierkegaard’s understanding of the pathos-shaping role of doctrines has several important implications. The most striking is his attention to their performative force, their ‘how’. Kierkegaard concludes that the meaning of a doctrine is not an inherent property that it possesses by virtue of its textual form, but is a function of its use. The meaning is not ascertained merely by knowing the formal definitions of the words and the grammatical relations among them. Words about the proper way to live only acquire meaning when they are used in the appropriate ways for the appropriate purposes, with the appropriate concern for the quality of a person’s life. Doctrines only have significance when they are employed to move individuals in certain ways. This performative force of doctrines can assume a multitude of forms, for doctrinal language can be used to command, encourage, promise, comfort, exhort and a host of other things. Therefore, when used aptly, doctrines do not lead to the dispassion and indolence that characterize Christendom; quite the contrary, they stimulate and shape passion when the appropriate ‘how’ is in place. If a doctrine does promote abstraction from actual existence, the fault lies with the way it is being used, not with its content. For example, Kierkegaard explains that there is no problem with the doctrine of justification by grace in itself, except that a ‘cunning fellow’ such as himself could use it to legitimate spiritual lethargy.46 Kierkegaard’s concern for the appropriate performance of doctrinal language leads him to focus on a variety of contextual factors in the communication of Christian concepts. As we have seen, for Kierkegaard, the true comprehension of doctrinal language requires

45 46

JP 1:649, pp. 267–76 / SKS 27, Papir 365:2, p. 390. FSE, 24 / SKS 13, 52–3.

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the ability to imagine the pathos appropriate to it. In order for this enabling of pathos to be a real possibility, there must be a felicitous confluence of many factors, including not only the doctrinal content itself but also the voice of the person articulating the doctrine, the receptivity of the hearer, the relationship between them and the appropriate ‘mood’ of the communication. The apt performative circumstances must be in place in order for a doctrine to be meaningful in the genuinely Christian sense. Kierkegaard’s notes from 1847 for a projected lecture series on communication reiterate his contention that meaning is not purely a matter of ‘what’ is said but also of ‘how’ it is said.47 Similarly, he asserts that meaning depends on the specificities of ‘who said it, on what occasion, in what situation’.48 For Kierkegaard, the voice of the person articulating a doctrine is a crucial factor in establishing its meaning. The speaker’s words and the speaker’s life should be congruent, for only then will the pathos that helps constitute the real meaning of a doctrine become evident. He remarks, ‘In one person’s mouth the same words can be so full of substance, so trustworthy, and in another person’s mouth they can be like the vague whispering of leaves.’49 For example, preachers who rhapsodize about self-sacrifice from a position of comfort and security evacuate their language of meaning; it is by no means clear what they mean by ‘self-sacrifice’, or even worse, a false impression is given. Similarly, theologians who preach in elegant surroundings, even if their words are entirely orthodox, are not proclaiming genuine Christianity, ‘for Christianity can only be preached in real life’.50 The pseudonym H. H. observes that there is a difference between Jesus saying, ‘There is eternal life’ and theological graduate Peterson uttering the same words.51 For Kierkegaard, the proclamation of ‘sound doctrine’ fails to be meaningful if it is contradicted by the speaker’s complacent life, for a misleading enactment of the doctrine is thereby suggested.52 Therefore, in regard to the textual communication of doctrine, the implied authorial voice should be suited to the pathos associated with the content of the doctrine. For example, just as talk of duty should be put in the mouth of someone who instantiates civic rectitude, so also talk of sin should be placed in the mouth of a penitent, as Kierkegaard does in For Self-Examination. Similarly, Christological themes should be considered in a complex mood of reverence, repentance, joy and hope, as Kierkegaard does in Discourses for the Communion on Fridays. The ‘mood’, or the passional context in which a doctrine should be used, must also be appropriate to its conceptual content. Talk of God’s law requires an earnest and imperative mood, while talk of sin requires a mood of sober self-examination. For Kierkegaard, entire domains of discourse, such as scientific investigation or moral striving, require very particular overarching moods. For example, scientific discourse should be calm and disengaged. The way of life sketched by Christian doctrines requires a necessary mood of passionate concern for the quality of one’s own life. Therefore, doctrinal concepts must be carefully distinguished from other domains of discourse, all of which have their own distinctive moods. Christian concepts must not be translated into the alien idioms of philosophy or psychology, or the mood of earnestness will be destroyed.53 If doctrinal

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

JP 1:657, p. 303 / SKS 27, Papir 371:2, p. 430; JP 1:678, p. 317 / SKS 23, NB15:128, p. 91. UDVS, 264 / SKS 8, 361. WL, 11–12 / SKS 9, 19. KJN 5, p. 299 / SKS 21, NB10:58, p. 288. WA, 101–2 / SKS 11, 105. JFY, 133 / SKS 16, 187. CA, 15–16 / SKS 4, 322–3.

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language is conflated with either philosophical or psychological discourse, Christianity devolves into the immanent categories of ordinary human consciousness. Consequently, Kierkegaard denounced speculative dogmatics as a serious confusion. For example, speculative theology, of the sort practised by H. L. Martensen, conflates the logical issue of ‘mediation’ with the Christian concept of ‘reconciliation’ with God, and thereby makes reconciliation seem like an inevitability that can be taken for granted. Similarly, when philosophy co-opts doctrinal language, ‘sin’ becomes the necessary moment of individuation and alienation in the development of ‘Spirit’. Against this, Vigilius protests that original sin cannot be translated into the vocabulary of psychological or metaphysical causation, for then it loses the proper mood of the self-ascription of guilt. For Kierkegaard, doctrines are not only irreducible to other modes of discourse but are also presuppositional principles. As such, they are the logically primitive and basic categories of the Christian faith.54 They cannot be explained by an appeal to something allegedly more foundational. Christian doctrines cannot be derived from other forms of subjectivity or from the supposedly universal structures of human experience; they are sui generis. They are not specifications or outgrowths of generic religiosity or common ethical values. Climacus argues that religiousness B (a cypher for Christianity) is not reducible to religiousness A (generic spirituality).55 Christianity involves a transcendent point of departure, not organically developed out of the previous evolution of the individual or the race. The basic concepts of Christianity, like ‘I am a sinner’ are presupposed by Christianity in the way that ‘I exist’ is presupposed by all first-person communication.56 For Kierkegaard, the skein of Christian doctrines must be unique and foundational because they enable the individual to imagine and experience the attractions of a new, previously unanticipated existential possibility. When used meaningfully, Kierkegaard also claims that doctrines and dogmas possess authority, for such presuppositional concepts are the non-negotiable ground of a distinctive way of life.57 Sometimes Kierkegaard uses ‘theology’ to suggest mere human speculation, while ‘dogmatics’ points to something more authoritative. Doctrines used rightly are not human opinions about Christianity but are essential normative convictions. The authority of doctrines is not based on any attractive quality that they might possess, such as their seeming profundity according to worldly canons of wisdom, or their rhetorical elegance according to worldly standards of beauty. The would-be apologist should not attempt to defend them by appealing to any antecedent criteria of value, for that strategy implies that there is something more foundational in the light of which Christianity can be evaluated.58 For Kierkegaard, doctrines have ‘apostolic authority’, which means that they must simply be taken as the necessary presuppositions of the Christian life.59 Accordingly, Anti-Climacus maintains that ‘orthodoxy emphasizes that there must be a revelation from God to teach fallen humanity what sin is, a communication that, quite consistently, must be believed because it is a dogma’.60 In spite of Kierkegaard’s focus on the need for the appropriate context of pathos in order for a doctrine to be meaningful, he does trust that doctrines do refer to states

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

CA, 10 / SKS 4, 318. CUP, 610–1 / SKS 7, 189–91. JP 1:1032, p. 451 / SKS 18, JJ:223, p. 21. WA, 104 / SKS 11, 108. WA, 104 / SKS 11, 108. WA, 96 / SKS 11, 100. SUD, 96 / SKS 11, 209.

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of affairs that exist beyond the ‘inwardness’ of the individual; their meaning cannot be reduced without remainder to a set of passions or dispositions. Used rightly, they do inform the individual about many matters, including human sinfulness, the goal of human life, the availability of grace and the nature of God. Kierkegaard insists that even with an appropriate appreciation of the critical significance of inwardness, we still need objective teachings with referential force.61 Kierkegaard assumes that doctrines do make assertions, including some historical ones, such as the doctrine of the incarnation’s claim that God really did enter time. Similarly, the pseudonym H. H. asserts that the ‘dogma’ of the death and sacrifice of Jesus must be accepted as a historical event.62 However, Kierkegaard never retreats from his conviction that the referential function of doctrines is parasitic upon their pathos-shaping employment. It is not as if one first cognitively understands the doctrine, and then subsequently imagines the passions that are suggested by it. The ‘what’ and the ‘how’ are not sequentially related, as if understanding the doctrine preceded its appropriation and enactment. The emotions and passions that attend a doctrine’s use are a constitutive part of its meaning. This is certainly not to say that there is no referent of doctrinal language, but only that using doctrines referringly has crucial passional requisites, just as ethical communication does.63 In all matters of existential significance, the ‘what’ always requires a commensurate ‘how’.

III. AN EXPLICIT ENGAGEMENT WITH DOCTRINE: THE CASE OF ORIGINAL SIN In order to appreciate the uniqueness of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the proper use of doctrines, let us examine two examples of the diverse ways that his literature elucidates doctrinal themes. The first example has been chosen because it represents a rather overt and sustained attempt by a pseudonymous author to help the reader engage a particular doctrinal concept. The second example was selected because it exemplifies the way in which a doctrinal concept can permeate an expansive swath of Kierkegaard’s authorship without being made explicit. The first example, that of an explicit engagement with a specific doctrine, is the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis’s treatment of original sin. Original sin is the pervasive issue lurking in the background (and often the foreground) of The Concept of Anxiety. In accord with Kierkegaard’s Lutheran heritage, Vigilius assumes both the inevitability and the universality of sin, and also the individual’s responsibility for her own sinfulness. The conjunction of these two themes had generated a perennial conundrum for theology. The first theme made sin seem like an overpowering state of corruption which exercises an enduring power over an individual and infects an individual’s life as a whole (not just an individual episode), while the second theme made sin sound like a free action, or ‘leap’, which the individual performs. The ‘state of corruption’ motif seemed to imply that sin is a non-culpable condition that afflicts an individual, while the ‘guilty act’ language suggested that sin is voluntary and intentional. Kierkegaard was well aware that these two types of discourse did not sit well together. As a student, he had heard H. N. Clausen’s lectures that recounted Augustine’s view

61 62 63

JP 1:650, p. 279 / SKS 27, Papir 366:1–5, pp. 399–400. WA, 58 / SKS 11, 64. JP 1:650, p. 279 / SKS 27, Papir 366:1–5, pp. 399–400.

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that sin is innate and inherited, but is also the individual’s own fault.64 From his lectures and theological textbooks Kierkegaard was aware that various theological traditions had tried to resolve this conundrum through the elaboration of diverse explanatory theories, all focused on the relation of the individual’s corrupt state to Adam’s responsible act. Perhaps Adam was a ‘real universal’, a Platonic form in whom all subsequent humans participate. Perhaps every individual was seminally present in Adam’s loins, and therefore literally sinned with Adam. Perhaps, as the ‘federal theology’ proposed, the individual was legally represented by Adam, as stipulated by God’s covenant with humanity, and therefore Adam’s guilt could legitimately be imputed to his descendants. Recent philosophical developments gave the issues associated with original sin new currency. Kierkegaard’s intellectual culture continued to be influenced by Kant’s insistence that guilt could only be ascribed to an individual’s free act not governed by the nexus of cause and effect. This emphasis on personal voluntarism undermined any sense of solidarity in sin or sin’s inevitability. Sympathetic to this Kantian tradition but hoping to salvage a sense of sin’s universality, Julius Müller proposed that every soul freely determines itself as sinful in a transtemporal noumenal realm. It is significant that Kierkegaard owned and commented on Müller’s magnum opus on sin, and seems to have read parts of the first edition before 1844.65 G. W. F. Hegel introduced an opposite perspective into the conversation by describing sin in such a way that it seemed like a necessary moment in the evolution of humanity. Sin was the consequence of the individuation that was required in order for finitude to be possible. As such, sin could be regarded as an inevitable phenomenon in the development of Spirit, which seemed to relieve the individual of any real culpability. Kierkegaard was fully familiar with this view through the work of J. L. Heiberg and the critiques of it by H. L. Martensen. Kierkegaard resisted any suggestion that sin was a developmental necessity in humanity’s maturation, but he also clung to the convictions that sin was universal, that it infected everyone’s motivational core, and that it was impossible to overcome it through programs of self-improvement. However, he refused to try to resolve the theological tension between these themes by developing a speculative theory to explain the conjunction of inevitability and responsibility. He rejected theories about the individual’s putative ontological, biological or legal solidarity with Adam, as well as Müller’s positing of a transtemporal fall. Instead of resorting to fanciful theorizing, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis clarifies the passions which make ‘original sin’ intelligible. After affirming that original sin is a foundational concept for Christian dogmatics, Vigilius illustrates how sin could both be experienced as a power over an individual, but also as the individual’s act.66 Avoiding the metaphysical volatilization of the doctrine, Vigilius turns to the analysis of human passions to illumine the way in which sin could be both a kind of bondage and a culpable act. As a keen psychological observer of human life, Vigilius concludes that people sin because they succumb to anxiety. The object of this anxiety is simply the prospect of doing anything for which the individual could be

64 65

66

KJN 3, pp. 80–2 / SKS 19, NB1:9, pp. 82–3. Julius Müller, Die christliche Lehre von der Sünde, vols 1–2, 3rd revised and enlarged edition (Breslau: Josef Max, 1849); ASKB 689–90. See Christine Axt-Piscalar, ‘Julius Müller: Parallels in the Doctrines of Sin and Freedom’, in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 6: tome II (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), 143–59 [153–4]. CA, 26–7 / SKS 4, 333–4.

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held responsible. Anxiety is an ambivalent phenomenon, for the power of ‘being able’ is attractive, but the assumption of responsibility is daunting and repellent. This ambivalence, the ‘dizziness of freedom’, is unbearably destabilizing. The desire to terminate the intolerable vertigo by choosing the negative course of action motivates the leap into sin. In this way sin can be seen as motivated, but not as necessitated by antecedent conditions. The important aspect of this psychological exploration is that Vigilius does not just expatiate about anxiety. Rather, he instantiates it, seemingly without intending to do so. Vigilius claims to be a disengaged psychological observer of human life, as the sobriquet ‘Watchman of Copenhagen’ suggests. Psychology, he explains, requires a mood of cool detachment and clinical objectivity. Although Vigilius often does sound clinical and disengaged, his voyeuristic fascination with sin is palpable. Vigilius enacts in his writing the sympathetic antipathy and the antipathetic sympathy about which he writes. Vigilius is an anxious person, and his anxiety is contagious. The reader is infected with the book’s erratic, unstable mood, and is provoked to become anxious about the quality of her own life. The reader contracts anxiety about the possibility of sin in her own life, and stares spellbound at the prospect of terminating the anxiety by surrendering to sin. The reader simultaneously feels overwhelmed but also responsible. Vigilius has helped the reader to imaginatively experience the paradoxical coincidence of bondage and freedom that is the passional heart of the doctrine of original sin. The stimulation of this unsettling pathos takes the place of speculative theories about the individual’s relation to Adam and Eve’s fall. The force of the doctrine of original sin in asserting the coinherence of inevitability and culpability is communicated through the elicitation of certain passions, and not through the fabrication of metaphysical schemas.67

IV. AN IMPLICIT ENGAGEMENT WITH DOCTRINE: THE CASE OF THE TRINITY As an example of Kierkegaard’s more implicit engagement with doctrinal matters, let us consider his approach to the doctrine the Trinity. The Trinity is significant because overt attention to the doctrine is absent in Kierkegaard’s writings. He did not write a monograph to deal with this concept even in an indirect way, and it is not the explicit topic of any of his Christian discourses. In fact, the word rarely appears in his published writings. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard did portray the Christian faith in Trinitarian terms. Because Kierkegaard was convinced that the meanings of doctrines could not be discursively stated, his exposition of Trinitarian themes is embedded in his efforts to elicit three clusters of Christian passions and dispositions. Kierkegaard was by no means ignorant of the complexities of Trinitarian doctrine.68 Among the educated classes of Denmark’s Golden Age, well-publicized and sometimes vitriolic controversies had catapulted the Trinity onto centre stage. Some mildly rationalistic theologians, like his theology professor Henrik Nicolai Clausen, had little use for the abstruse concept.69 Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose work Kierkegaard studied under H. L. Martensen, relegated the Trinity to an appendix at the end of his classic

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CA, 9–14 / SKS 4, 315–21. Karl Bretschneider, Handbuch der Dogmatik der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, vols 1–2. 3rd edn (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1828). KJN 3, pp. 36–7 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:7, pp. 42–3.

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Christian Faith because it is not directly an articulation of the believer’s lived experience of redemption.70 New prominence was given to Trinitarian language in the works of G. W. F. Hegel.71 Hegel famously argued that a triadic movement beginning with undifferentiated identity, proceeding through differentiation and culminating in the synthesis of identity and difference, animates all phenomena. According to Hegel, this concept of the triadic dynamic of ‘Spirit’ is the implicit meaning of the more pictorial language of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Awareness of Hegel’s speculative interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity was mediated to Kierkegaard in a variety of ways. In 1837, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the influential Danish poet, playwright and philosopher, lauded Hegel for correctly perceiving that the traditional doctrine of the Trinity should be translated into a metaphysical principle.72 Kierkegaard encountered similar Hegelian themes in the 1841/2 Berlin lectures of Philipp Marheineke, and in Marheineke’s textbook on Christian doctrine.73 Some theologians, like Marheineke, sought to articulate this Hegelian dialectic in such a way that the triadic dynamic is more clearly rooted in God’s inner being logically prior to its enactment in the world. Even more so, in Denmark, H. L. Martensen, Kierkegaard’s theology tutor, expressed concern that Hegel’s Trinitarian language was nothing more than a way of describing an allegedly necessary and impersonal dialectical movement.74 In 1838, Kierkegaard heard Martensen’s lectures that described God as the free, self-conscious and timeless ground of the drama of the temporal actualization of God’s eternally reconciling love.75 Creation, redemption and consummation are the economic Trinitarian outworkings of God’s immanent Trinitarian life of self-differentiation and reconciliation. Other thinkers objected even more strongly to the apparent doctrinal implications of Hegel’s idealism. In his much anticipated Berlin lectures of 1841/2 that Kierkegaard attended, Friedrich Schelling emphasized the differences between God’s three originating ‘potencies’ so sharply that his language sounded almost tritheistic.76 In 1838, Frederik Christian Sibbern, a professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, published a widely read polemic arguing that Hegel’s Trinity was nothing more than a veiled proposal that God achieves self-consciousness only through the minds of human beings.77 Although Kierkegaard was very much aware of these debates about the Trinity, he did not directly engage them. Kierkegaard’s antipathy to the abstractly theoretic approach to the Trinity ran deep; he did not believe that the meaning of the doctrine of the Trinity could be articulated in a mood of academic neutrality, as if the Trinity were the conclusion of a syllogism or the resolution of a metaphysical puzzle. Consequently Kierkegaard does

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Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), 738–51. See Peter C. Hodgson, Hegel and Christian Theology: A Reading of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Johan Ludvig Heiberg, ‘Recension over Hr. Dr. Rothes Treenigheds – og Forsoningslære’, Perseus no. 1 (1837): 1–89. Philipp K. Marheineke, Lehrbuch des christlichen Glaubens und Lebens für denkende Christen, 2nd edn (Berlin: Nicolai, 1836). See also Kierkegaard’s notes on Marheineke’s lecture on the Trinity in KJN 3, pp. 291–4 / SKS 19, Notebook 10:8–9, pp. 293–6. Hans Lassen Martensen, De autonomia conscientiæ sui humanæ in theologiam dogmaticum nostri temporis introducta (Copenhagen: I. D. Quist, 1837). KJN 2, pp. 342–52 / SKS 18, KK:11, pp. 374–86. KJN 3, pp. 333–58 / SKS 19, Notebook 11:22–36, pp. 335–59. Frederik Christian Sibbern, Bemærkninger og Undersøgelser fornemmelig betreffende Hegels Philosophie (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1838).

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not attempt to clarify the concept ‘Trinity’ by situating it in a philosophical schema, but instead seeks to clarify the emotions, passions and dispositions that constitute a life lived in the light of the Trinity. Many of Kierkegaard’s literary depictions of various aspects of Christian faith can be read as dramatizations of the various forms of pathos appropriate to each of the three persons of the Trinity. In this sense, Kierkegaard implicitly develops a functional equivalent of an economic view of the Trinity. This economic Trinitarian dynamic is most evident in the structure of the prayer that opens Works of Love. The first clause invokes the ‘source of all love in heaven and on earth’, while the second addresses ‘our Savior and Redeemer’ who revealed what love is, and the last lauds the ‘Spirit of love’ who exhorts ‘the believer to love as he is loved and his neighbor as himself ’.78 Kierkegaard’s pages are replete with motifs typically associated with the First Person of the Trinity, the ‘Creator of heaven and earth’, who ‘creates out of nothing’.79 Kierkegaard often uses ‘Creator’ and ‘Father’ language to express utter dependence upon God for the gift of one’s own life, and for the continuing existence of all things.80 Much of his authorship encourages the awareness that we are not the creators, sustainers or masters of our own lives, for without God, we can do nothing.81 Accordingly, Kierkegaard admonishes his readers ‘to be contented with being a human being, with being the humble one, the created being who can no more support himself than create himself ’.82 Because our very existence is a gift, and all our capacities are gifts, we can boast about none of our putative accomplishments. Our highest joy is the humble recognition of the depths of our need for God.83 Faithful to his conviction that the pathos of a religious communication must reflect its content, in these passages Kierkegaard is careful to exhibit a celebratory mood in order to joyfully laud the creator’s bounty. Kierkegaard further associates the themes of dependence and humility with the motif of gratitude for sheer existence and God’s on-going solicitude.84 Kierkegaard famously praised the lilies of the field and the birds of the air as exemplars of freedom from debilitating worldly concerns.85 Kierkegaard’s treatment of the forms of pathos appropriate to the Second Person of the Trinity, the redeemer, revolves around his discussion of Jesus Christ. True to his refusal to speculate about metaphysics, Kierkegaard did not worry about the conceptual quandary of the union of infinite divinity and finite humanity. For him, the claim that eternity entered time was not a philosophical puzzle to be resolved by developing a more illuminating conceptual system. Instead, Kierkegaard wrote in such a way that clarity about the incarnation would be achieved by ensuring that the pathos of discourse about Christ was appropriate to the theme of redemption. Kierkegaard articulated this in a journal entry, advising, ‘Believe that Christ is God – then call upon him, pray to him, and the rest comes by itself.’86 Kierkegaard insisted that a profound dissatisfaction with one’s own spiritual self and a sense of powerlessness to heal one’s own debility are the most fundamental prerequisites

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

WL, 3–4 / SKS 9, 12. CD, 127 / SKS 10, 138. EUD, 32–48 / SKS 5, 42–56. JP 3:3439, p. 570 / SKS 22, NB11:169, p. 100. UDVS, 177 / SKS 8, 276. EUD, 303 / SKS 5, 297. JFY, 180–1 / SKS 16, 228–9. WA, 3–45 / SKS 11, 9–48. JP 1:318, p. 133 / SKS 20, NB4:81, p. 328.

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for understanding language about the Second Person.87 If the requisite mood of repentance is present, the individual may then experience the appropriate gratitude and wonder over the unfathomable depths of God’s redemptive love that embraces sinners. To communicate this pathos, Kierkegaard appropriately adopted the voice of a penitent addressing fellow sinners in order to reassure them of the possibility of forgiveness. The sublime beauty of this divine love should awaken a loving response in the individual. Like most Lutherans, Kierkegaard’s writings about the incarnation were patterned according to the theme of kenosis, the self-emptying of God in order to participate in the human condition.88 First and foremost, Jesus was the God who sought genuine solidarity with lowly, fallen human beings and was willing to surrender heavenly glory in order to enact the more profound sublimity of a humble life of unqualified self-giving.89 To dramatize this, the pseudonym Climacus narrated the tale of the king who longed for loving mutuality with a lowly peasant woman and therefore surrendered all the prerogatives of royalty.90 Climacus concludes, ‘For this is the boundlessness of love, that in earnestness and truth and not in jest it wills to be the equal of the beloved.’91 This vision of God’s passion for solidarity with humanity should elicit wonder, amazement, gratitude and delight. To emphasize this, the pseudonym H. H. relates the story of a young boy who was shown a picture of a crucified man and told that the man in the picture was the most loving person who had ever lived. The boy developed a progressive desire to want to give his own life in love for humanity, just as the man in the picture had done. As the author explains, the boy was moved by the sheer attractive power of the prospect of unconditional love.92 The role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life is also carefully depicted in Kierkegaard’s authorship, sometimes in subtle and sometimes in overt ways. Although the only sustained discussion of the Holy Spirit occurs in For Self-Examination, throughout his works Kierkegaard refers to the Holy Spirit as a personal agent, and insists that this Spirit is not to be identified with the spirit of the age, the spirit of humanity or any other immanent dynamic in the universe, for the Holy Spirit is not an enhancement of humanity’s ordinary religiosity.93 Rather, the Holy Spirit imparts an entirely new form of life and a new set of passions, all of which were unanticipated. True to his approach to theological discourse, Kierkegaard refuses to provide a neutral, discursive description of the Holy Spirit, for the Spirit can only be understood through the cultivation of passionate faith.94 For Kierkegaard, the Holy Spirit is that which must be invoked, trusted and thanked for stirring up and sustaining the faith of the individual. The faith-forming roles of the Spirit in Kierkegaard’s writings are multiple, spanning the inception of faith to its maturation and blossoming. It is the Holy Spirit who initiates the first movements of faith by awakening us to the depths of our despair,95 and imparts our very ability to grow in faith, hope, and love.96 The Holy Spirit is also the internal

87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

JP 2:1533, pp. 196–7 / SKS 25, NB27:39, p. 152. See David R. Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). PC, 170–1 / SKS 12, 173–4. PF, 31 / SKS 4, 237. PF, 32 / SKS 4, 238. WA, 55/ SKS 11, 62. FSE, 76 / SKS 13, 98. JP 6:6792, pp. 433–4 / SKS 24, NB25:48, p. 469. FSE, 76–7, SKS 13, 98–9. FSE, 81–3 / SKS 13, 102–4.

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source of the believer’s ultimate joy,97 and of the believer’s prayers.98 Consequently, our ostensible growth in Christian pathos should not be prized as our own accomplishment or attributed to our own spiritual stamina.99 Because we are powerless to persevere by ourselves, it is the Holy Spirit who leads us to follow Christ’s way of the cross in the face of society’s opposition and emboldens us to ‘suffer for the truth’.100 Most sweepingly, the capacity to realize that one needs the Holy Spirit for empowerment is itself a gift of the Holy Spirit.101 In all these instances Kierkegaard was encouraging the reader to thank God for every aspect of the development of the reader’s own subjectivity and to indulge in no self-congratulation over any ostensible inner improvement.102 The pervasiveness of these three clusters of different aspects of Christian pathos throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship suggests that he did implicitly understand the Christian life in terms of the economic Trinity. However, Kierkegaard’s engagement with the doctrine of the Trinity was not restricted to the exposition of God’s threefold economy. For Kierkegaard, the activities of God ad extra are manifestations of God’s life of love in se. Consequently, Kierkegaard also sought to nurture the pathos appropriate to the immanent Trinity. In Kierkegaard’s era, the doctrine of the immanent Trinity had functioned as an abstract way of affirming that God’s essential characteristic is love. Kierkegaard entirely agreed, often waxing exuberantly rhapsodic about the sublimity of that love.103 God does not just contingently love the world in three different ways; rather, God in se is loving relationality. True to his authorial strategy, Kierkegaard refrains from trying to explain the logistics of God’s inner life. Rather, he sought to show what God’s intrinsic lovingness is like by enacting the passions that should be a response to it. Accordingly, he adopted the voice of an encomiast of love, for the joyfulness that is intrinsic to love must be communicated through a mood of ecstatic celebration; doxology is the appropriate genre for talk of God’s love. God’s love is reduplicated in Kierkegaard’s authorial practice as he lovingly seeks to inspire the reader to share his joy. Accordingly, Kierkegaard opens Works of Love with a prayerful direct address to God as ‘the source of all love in heaven and on earth; you who spared nothing but in love gave everything; you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you’.104 He exults that God is the font of love, for ‘just as the quiet lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has seen, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love’.105 As the first chapter of Works of Love makes clear, God’s acts of creating, redeeming and sanctifying are three different outpourings of God’s internal life of love. God already is the joyful perfection of love, even apart from the creation of the universe. Without the elaborate metaphysical apparatus typical of his contemporaries, these remarks are Kierkegaard’s functional equivalent of the theme that the economic Trinity is the expression of the immanent Trinity.

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UDVS, 210 / SKS 8, 305. JP 2:2257, p. 524 / SKS 17, DD:176, pp. 270–1. WL, 17–90 / SKS 9, 25–50. FSE, 85 / SKS 13, 105. EUD, 139 / SKS 5, 141–2. Leo Stan, ‘Holy Spirit’, in Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Tome III: Envy to Incognito, ed. Steven Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15: tome III (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 157–61. UDVS, 267–8, 274, 277 / SKS 8, 364–5, 370, 373. WL, 3 / SKS 9, 12. WL, 9 / SKS 9, 17.

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In his own unique way Kierkegaard did express the main themes traditionally associated with the doctrine of the Trinity, shifting attention away from the construction of conceptual systems to the task of integrating a complex and rich family of interactive passions. He rhetorically performs three different responses to three different aspects of God’s love, as well as a response to the sheer sublimity of God as the font of all love.

CONCLUSION Kierkegaard’s authorship carefully distinguishes the edifying uses of doctrines from their ideological and speculative misuses. Throughout his writings he differentiated doctrines as pathos-shaping precepts from doctrines as mere cognitive propositions. According to Kierkegaard doctrines should never be utilized to reinforce societal values or to construct a speculative metaphysics. If doctrines are abstracted from life, they become spiritually debilitating diversions, but if they are applied to life they open up new existential possibilities. Kierkegaard’s view of the necessary conditions of Christian communication implies that doctrines are not significant under all circumstances, but only when they are used to shape a coherent religious life. The meaningfulness of doctrines requires the presence of a great many factors, including the personal cultivation of earnestness about the quality of the hearer/reader’s own life, the exhibiting of the appropriate pathos by the speaker/writer, the suiting of the mood to the content of the communication and fidelity to the uniqueness of the domain of discourse. When these factors are present, doctrines can refer meaningfully to God. Through the struggle to forge a distinctive way of feeling, desiring, perceiving and dealing with life’s vicissitudes and challenges, doctrines assume normative status. Kierkegaard was no typical nineteenth-century theologian. His insistence that doctrines only acquire meaning when they are put to an upbuilding use was a drastic revisioning of the entire theological task. No longer could theology be construed as the construction of a rigorously logical system of propositions to be contemplated and then affirmed, like physics or geometry. That objective approach failed to include the crucial factor that gives doctrines any meaning at all: the skein of passions and purposes in which they are embedded. Without those passions being made clear, the doctrinal phrases become abstract and vacuous cyphers. Therefore, the appropriate passions that make doctrines significant must be inscribed in the theological writing itself; they cannot be relegated to a subsequent act of ‘application to life’. Theology must be practised through the pathosladen acts of repenting, exhorting, praising, thanking and exulting, or it will degenerate into nonsense.

FURTHER READING Barrett, Lee C. Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013). Gouwens, David J. Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Hampson, Daphne. Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Law, David R. Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Walsh, Sylvia. Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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CHAPTER FIVE

Kierkegaard on the Church: Between Rejection and Redemption MATTHEW D. KIRKPATRICK

INTRODUCTION As one scholar has rightly observed, ‘Any mention of “Kierkegaardian ecclesiology” might appear oxymoronic.’1 Kierkegaard is, after all, known for his unrelenting defence of ‘the single individual’, and his affirmation of subjectivity. Both concepts do little to recommend themselves to communitarian or ecclesial thought. Indeed, Kierkegaard has been more closely associated with nihilism, acosmism and irrationalism than with such uniting concepts as the body of Christ. If we then consider that Kierkegaard’s most famous pronouncements about the church come by way of a scandalous public attack at the end of his life, it is not surprising that so little attention is given to developing a serious Kierkegaardian ecclesiology. And yet, it is the contention of this chapter that Kierkegaard not only takes the church seriously, but that it is only from this foundation that his religious authorship can be understood. Although his perception will remain deficient to some, Kierkegaard not only develops an ecclesial position, but does so in relation to a concrete form of community that becomes important for the development of the individual. This chapter will offer an introduction to Kierkegaard’s ecclesial thought, but also engage with some of the key questions that inevitably arise. Much of the secondary literature has focused on Kierkegaard’s final attack, which has meant that his earlier, more clearly positive ecclesiology has been overlooked. In contrast, this chapter will focus on the development of his understanding of the church before reflecting on the attack at the end. Such an analysis necessarily requires engaging with Kierkegaard’s unique context and changing circumstances, as well as his undulating psychological state. Consequently, it cannot hope to be exhaustive. However, it will follow Kierkegaard through some of the key moments of his life to understand the nature of his progression and offer at least the foundations for seeing Kierkegaard in a more ecclesial light.

1

From a short article written by Charles Creegan in 1994 entitled ‘Kierkegaard’s Ecclesiology’. Although it remains an unpublished ‘work in progress’, interred now at the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St Olaf College, it offers some valuable insights into Kierkegaard’s view of the church.

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Denmark’s Ecclesial Foundations Before proceeding further, a few brief points need to be made concerning the Danish Church’s unique history. During the sixteenth century, Denmark underwent significant political, social and religious changes. Through a series a power struggles between the crown and the powerful catholic nobles and bishops, Denmark became a Lutheran state under Christian III (1503–1559). Having wrestled the power away from his opposition, Christian had not only established himself as an absolute monarch, but had also taken over control of the church. As someone who was profoundly dedicated to the Reformation – Christian had himself attended the Diet of Worms to hear Luther speak – by 1537 Christian had introduced a fully Lutheran Church Ordinance, drawn up under the advice of Lutheran theologians, and finally sent to Wittenberg for Luther’s own approval. By uniting church and state in such a complete way, priests also gained significant civic responsibilities. Denmark’s complex topography meant that the clergy were perfect royal servants as the church already reached every corner of the land.2 Consequently, alongside their sacred duties, the clergy also became responsible for keeping extensive documentation of its parishioners, overseeing institutionalized poor relief, healthcare and education; imposing and collecting fines; and implementing laws. The amalgamation of church and state intentions can be particularly seen in baptism becoming a requirement for citizenship, and church attendance being made compulsory. However, although priests were appointed directly by the King, they did not receive a fixed income but were paid according to civic or ecclesial services rendered within their parish. Consequently, clergy were very much dependent on their congregation for their salary, which would depend not just on their activity and performance, but also on the relative wealth and size of their parish. In summarizing the situation, Knud Jespersen aptly comments, While previously the Danish church had been an independent and powerful group on equal footing with the aristocracy, the Reformation reduced them to the position of civil servants, directly answerable for their conduct to the state. As a result of this subordinated role, the Danish clergy became ever-more instruments of the state over the following centuries. In fact, they became the most significant mouthpieces of the state to address the wider public.3 With the Royal Law of 1669 and the Danish Law of 1683 confirming the king’s authority over all clergy and the right to direct all ecclesial ceremony and worship, both Jespersen and Niels Thulstrup comment that the projects of both the state and church merged to such a degree that, in Thulstrup’s provocative words, ‘under the rule of absolute monarchy Denmark was, juridically speaking, without a Church’.4 Despite the rule of law entangling itself within the church, the theological and ecclesial landscape at the start of the nineteenth century was relatively diverse. In addition to rationalists such as H. G. Clausen (1759–1840) overseeing much of the seminary education, and Hegelians such as Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–1884) growing in influence within the University and then through the ranks of the church, Denmark also witnessed

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Niels Thulstrup comments that in 1800 Denmark’s population was 929,000, with 90 per cent living in rural areas. Niels Thulstrup, Kierkegaard and the Church in Denmark (Copenhagen: Reitzels Forlag, 1984), 72. Knud Jespersen, A History of Denmark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 97. Thulstrup, Kierkegaard and the Church, 15; cf. Jespersen, Denmark, 98, 103.

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the considerable influence of Pietism. Christian VI (1699–1746) became an avid follower of Halle Pietism, which then became popular within the court. In rural parishes, it was the far more emotive and anti-rationalist Pietism of Count Zinzendorf that would take root, and its adherents, known as ‘Herrnhuters’, formed strong communities including the influential ‘Community of Brothers’ established in Copenhagen in 1739. However, it was in the theology of N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) that the church found its most radical detractor. With a mixture of nationalism, Romanticism and Scandinavian mythology, Grundtvig’s theology emphasized the living word of God, handed down through the Apostles’ Creed rather than Scripture, and manifest within the community and its worship. His followers were deeply suspicious of the established church, and drew many of its followers away from the Herrnhut communities.5

I. THE FOUNDATIONS OF KIERKEGAARD’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE CHURCH If we consider Kierkegaard’s involvement within the church at its most superficial level, as a citizen Kierkegaard would have been fully initiated into its life. However, Kierkegaard was no ordinary Dane. Kierkegaard’s father, Michael Pedersen, had grown up within a rural Herrnhut community, and had joined the Congregation of Brothers upon his arrival in Copenhagen. As a child, therefore, Kierkegaard attended a state church on Sunday morning, before going on to the Congregation in the afternoon. Michael Pedersen was not, however, a typical Herrnhuter as he read widely and was deeply interested in theological and philosophical discussion. Although he continued to attend the Congregation, he became enamoured by the preaching of the young Jacob Peter Mynster who, although staunchly conservative, appealed to an anti-rationalist position from within the church, and was able to walk a middle path between the Pietists and the establishment. According to Jørgen Bukdahl, the Kierkegaard family home became ‘something of a cultural center in Copenhagen’,6 and a wide range of figures would visit, including Grundtvig and Mynster, and there is no doubt that Søren was exposed to these discussions. Indeed, when Michael Pedersen sided with Mynster, so Søren’s older brother, Peter Christian, became a fervent and influential supporter of Grundtvig. Kierkegaard’s early life, therefore, was punctuated by considerable reflection on the church. According to the recollection of one of his school friends, as a child Kierkegaard was someone who ‘appeared to be very conservative, to honour the King, to love the church, and to respect the police’,7 who held to a ‘religiosity of a strictly orthodox sort’.8 And as an adult, Kierkegaard’s life continued to revolve around his church attendance, frequenting not just the Sunday service at his favoured Vor Frue Kirke but also the Friday Communion as well. As Anders Holm comments, for most of his life, ‘Kierkegaard had been one of the most regular churchgoers in Copenhagen’.9 Kierkegaard had himself been destined for life as a priest, and later reflected that his first authorship had simply been a

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Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 35; Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 41. Jørgen Bukdahl, Søren Kierkegaard and the Common Man (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 27. As quoted in Josiah Thompson, Kierkegaard (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 4. Bruce Kirmmse, Encounters with Kierkegaard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 251. Anders Holm, ‘Kierkegaard and the Church’, in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 112–28 [113].

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hiatus from taking up a parish position. Although perhaps pressured by growing concerns over his finances, Kierkegaard continued to seek out an appointment until 1853 – just two years before his death and his scandalous attack on the church. Although Kierkegaard never took up an appointment, much of his writing embodies a surrogate position as it takes the form of ‘discourses’ that, although rejecting the title of ‘sermon’, remain in the style of a liturgical address.10 Covering a wide range of devotional themes, Kierkegaard also produced discourses that placed him directly into the role of the priest in specific liturgical settings. In Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (1845) the discourses are offered as sermons given at a confession, a wedding and a funeral. And between 1848 and 1851 Kierkegaard wrote a significant number of ‘Discourses at the Communion on Fridays’, three of which were delivered as sermons by Kierkegaard at his favoured Friday service. According to Michael Plekon, therefore, Kierkegaard’s identity is that of the ‘classical theologian’. Rather than an image of a detached academic, working outside of a confessional or ecclesial setting, such an individual ‘proclaims and celebrates the life of God lived within the Church’s Scriptures, traditions, and liturgy’, and is ‘at the root ecclesial and sacramental’.11 A similar position is presented by Howard Johnson who describes Kierkegaard as a ‘loyal son of the church’, whose relationship to the church was ‘the element in which he lived and moved and had his being’.12 However, as might be expected from his religious upbringing, Kierkegaard was no standard conservative. If we consider a journal entry from 1838, Kierkegaard states, There are on the whole very few men who are able to bear the Protestant view of life. If the Protestant view is really to become strengthening for the common man, it must either structure itself in a smaller community (separatism, small congregations, etc.) or approach Catholicism, in order in both cases to develop the mutual bearing of life’s burdens in a communal life, which only the most gifted individuals are able to dispense with. Christ indeed has died for all men, also for me, but this ‘for me’ must nevertheless be interpreted in such a way that he has died for me only insofar as I belong to the many.13 Kierkegaard recognizes a spiritual hierarchy between the few who may achieve the ideal form of Christianity, and those who do not. The church then gains its responsibility in developing normal people towards this end. Kierkegaard is clearly not committed to a specific form of church. There is little allegiance here for the state church in and of itself. Betraying perhaps his Herrnhut upbringing, the church is rather a community, and it is through this identity that it achieves its purpose. An analysis of Kierkegaard’s ecclesiology, therefore, cannot limit itself to explicit references to the church or its structure,

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12

13

Cf. George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses (London: Routledge, 2002), 12–13. Michael Plekon, ‘Kierkegaard the Theologian: The Roots of His Theology in Works of Love’, in Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community, ed. George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans (London: Humanities Press, 1992), 2–17 [4]. Howard Johnson, ‘Kierkegaard and the Church’, in Kierkegaardiana 8, ed. Niels Thulstrup and Maria Mikulová Thulstrup (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Boghandel, 1981), 64–79 [67]. One might also note the opinion of David Gouwens who argues that Kierkegaard’s biblical hermeneutics was deeply communal and imbibed with the conceptual framework of the church. David J. Gouwens, ‘Kierkegaard’s Hermeneutics of Discipleship’, in Søren Kierkegaard and the Word(s): Essays on Hermeneutics and Communication, ed. Poul Houe and Gordon Marino (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 2003), 81–92. JP 2:1976, p. 391 / SKS 17, DD:108, p. 254; cf. JP 2:1377, p. 109 / SKS 21, NB7:58, pp. 103–4.

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but must also concern itself with his understanding of community. It is to this that we now briefly turn.14

Kierkegaard’s Church and the Definition of Community In Two Ages we find a succinct definition of Kierkegaard’s understanding of community when he writes, When the individuals (severally) relate to the same idea, that relation is perfect and normal. The relation singles out individually (each has himself to himself) and unites ideally. In the essential inward directedness there is that modern reticence between man and man that prevents crude assumption . . . Thus individuals never come too close to one another in the brute sense, just because they are united at an ideal distance. The unanimity of the singled out is the band playing well-orchestrated music together.15 For Kierkegaard, individuals are established through passionate commitment to an idea, regardless of, and perhaps against, the opinion of others. To recall Kierkegaard’s famous reflections from Gilleleie in August 1835, ‘the crucial thing is to find a truth that is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die’.16 However, authentic community can be found when individuals come together around a shared idea, and when these relationships affirm, sustain and develop the individual’s passion for that idea. In this way, individuals are ‘united at an ideal distance’, joined together by the idea, but also equally separated by it. The idea stands as a middle term between them, mediating the relationship. And yet, without undermining this dynamic, the community stands as something of a middle term between the individual and the idea. It is through these relationships that the individual is drawn closer to the idea, but only in such a way that the gaze of the individual never rests on these relationships themselves but is always directed on to the idea.17 There is always a danger that such relationships will ‘lose their resilience’, and morph into the crowd.18 And this is particularly the case when the idea is some earthly concern such as politics or revolutionary zeal. However, when the idea is God, so the individual’s passionate commitment will be greatest, and so also the resilience of the relationships it may create.19 For Kierkegaard, the authentically dialectical relationship can be found within such earthly responsibilities as marriage, parenthood and profession, as here one may discover one’s eternal responsibility, and so be developed towards one’s individual relationship to God through these relationships.20 However, in relationship to the church the mundane 14

15

16 17 18 19

20

For a more in-depth treatment of Kierkegaardian community, see Matthew D. Kirkpatrick, ‘Sociological Categories and the Journey to Selfhood: From the Crowd to Community ’, in Kierkegaard and Political Theology, ed. Silas Morgan and Roberto Sirvent (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2018), 341–57. Søren Kierkegaard, A Literary Review, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 2001), 55; cf. TA, 62. Cf. JP 3:2952, p. 318 / SKS 23, NB15:60, p. 40. JP 5:5100, p. 34 / SKS 17, AA:12, p. 24. JP 2:1377, p. 109 / SKS 21, NB7:58, pp. 103–4. TA, 78. In his journals Kierkegaard confirms the identity of community and the requirement of relational resilience when he comments, ‘it is not the single individual’s relationship to the community or congregation which determines his relationship to God, but his relationship to God which determines his relationship to the congregation.’ JP 1:595, p. 241 / SKP X 5 B 245, n.d., 1849–50. UDVS, 129–31.

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requirements of life have been stripped away, and this dialectic becomes rarified. This is made especially clear in such liturgical acts as preaching, confession and communion.

Preaching At the beginning of Two Ages, Kierkegaard describes the dialectical relationship in terms of preaching. If one listens to a sermon that is not delivered by an individual, one will come away with an impression of the preacher, but not the message. It may be the ecclesial robes, or the apparent sincerity of their disposition, or imaginative or helpful exegetical analogies. But it will not be a word that drives one further into passion and inwardness. On the other hand, if one hears the preaching of a true individual, the effect is quite the opposite. The listener will forget about the specifics of the preacher, and be left only with an impression of the word preached, and its effect upon one’s life. As Kierkegaard describes, ‘If you have listened properly to a sermon brim-full of inwardness, even if your gaze has been fixed on the pastor, you will find it impossible to describe the pastor’s appearance . . . Outwardness, on the other hand, forces itself upon one, making it impossible to forget because there is nothing to remember.’21 As he elaborates, ‘Where essential passion is present in inwardness, the surroundings are forgotten.’22 The point here is the same as the above. In relationship to true individuals, their relationship is a real one, and yet the gaze of the individual never remains on the human other but is always pointed, by the aid of the other, onto the truth for which they are both striving. For this reason, it is only the individual that can communicate the truth of God. As Kierkegaard argues in a journal entry of the same period, ‘The truth can neither be communicated or received without the help of God, without God as accomplice, the middle term, since he is the truth. Therefore it can be communicated and received only by “the single individual”.’23 In Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Kierkegaard uses the image of the theatre where the prompter whispers to the actor to aid their performance before the audience. In the same way, the voice of the individual other is but a whisper to focus the individual on their self-conscious performance before God.24

Confession When we consider Kierkegaard’s discourses on confession, the contours of this dynamic are further elaborated. At the heart of confession is the requirement of the individual standing before God in total isolation. And as Kierkegaard makes clear, ‘There is no fellowship – each one is by himself.’25 An individual can only come to an awareness of their sin by themselves, and it is only in stillness that one can hear one’s own inner conviction.26 However, for Kierkegaard the environment of confession is also a prominent focus. For it is the surroundings that aid the individual’s inner stillness and creates space for a ‘holy fear’ and earnestness to be instilled. As he comments, ‘But what quietness means, what the surroundings are saying within this quietness: that is the inexpressible.’27

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Kierkegaard, Literary Review, 30; cf. TA, 36. Ibid., 33. JP 3:2932, p. 307 / SKS 20, NB:64, pp. 54–5. UDVS, 124–5. TDIO, 9–10. Cf. TDIO, 27–8. UDVS, 20.

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Within its confession ritual, the church’s responsibility is to prepare the individual. With something of a warning towards the church, Kierkegaard confirms, ‘[T]o confess is a holy act, an act for which the mind is collected in preparation. Thus the surroundings, too, know very well what they mean by the quietness – that they command earnestness. They know that it is their will to be understood; they know that it is a new guilt if they are misunderstood.’28 In a discourse from 1845, Kierkegaard particularly highlights the social context of the confession. Although he argues that no one can be taught by others the ‘true wonder and true fear’ essential for confession, so ‘when they compress and expand your soul . . . they are in truth for you.’29 For Kierkegaard, our social relationships can never stand in the way of God or overcome the need for his direct, if terrifying presence. However, these relationships can develop and drive our spiritual respiration – ‘compressing and expanding your soul’ – to breathe in the presence of God. At the end of the discourse, therefore, Kierkegaard questions whether its emphasis on the isolated individual is intended to be divisive, and comments, ‘Oh, in the midst of all the distress, what beautiful joy in life, in the human race, in being human oneself. Oh, in the stillness, what beautiful harmony with everyone! Oh, in this solitude, what beautiful fellowship with everyone!’30

Communion As with the liturgical order of the Friday service, Kierkegaard’s communion discourses follow on from those of confession. For where the individual is stripped down to raw vulnerability at confession, so at Christ’s table peace is once again found. After the process of preparation, the individual gains an inexpressible longing for communion with Christ, and to be taken up into him. And at the Communion table this is on some level fulfilled.31 The church is therefore essential to this task. As Kierkegaard describes, ‘You are on the way, and God’s house is a biding place where you seek rest for your soul.’32 For at the Communion table it is not the voice of the priest that we hear, but rather Christ himself. The priest here acts only as ‘Christ’s servant’.33 The church therefore mediates Christ for the individual to meet with him alone. As Kierkegaard concludes, ‘The Communion table, to be sure, remains standing there, and you go to the Communion table, but yet it is the Communion table only if he is present there – therefore where he is, there is the Communion table.’34 Although there may be ‘few men who are able to bear the Protestant view of life’ and so dispense with such aid, in each of these rituals, the church is essential in bringing people into isolated relationship with God. When such duties are performed correctly, the church’s words, prayers, sights, sounds and people drop away to leave the individual alone. We might agree with Lee Barrett who describes the church’s responsibility to ‘help the individual to stand alone before God, and then to get out of the way’.35 And yet, these

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

UDVS, 21–2. TDIO, 25. TDIO, 38. CD, 254–5. CD, 265. CD, 271. CD, 273. Lee C. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 377.

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elements within the church must remain as the invisible channel. But we should note again the difference between the church as community, defined by the nature of its relationships and rituals, and the church as an establishment. The church’s identity, for Kierkegaard, is contingent on its ability to fulfil its responsibilities, and its form is only relevant towards this end. Especially in his discussion of communion, it is not the establishment that makes the Lord’s table, but only the Lord himself when mediated by the individual. During this early period we find the foundations of a positive ecclesiology. Although Kierkegaard clearly affirmed the established church by his attendance, he was by no means uncritical of it, and understood the theological essence of the church to transcend its embodiment in the state church. As will be shown, these insights are crucial for understanding the nature of Kierkegaard’s relationship to the church in his later works, and in what he may or may not be discarding in his final attack.

II. 1848 AND KIERKEGAARD’S ECCLESIAL CRITIQUE In 1848 Denmark underwent a revolution. In contrast to the bloody years of the French Revolution, the angry crowd that marched on Christiansborg Palace on 21 March 1848 was met by the newly enthroned Frederik VII (1808–1863) who informed it that its demands had already been met, and that the whole government had resigned. With the incorporation of a number of the leading ‘revolutionaries’ into the new government, a new constitution was created, and signed by the King on 5 June 1849, defining the new form of government as a ‘restricted monarchy’.

The Revolution of 1848 For Kierkegaard, the revolution was ‘chaos’36 and a ‘catastrophe’.37 Denmark desperately needed a spiritual revolution. However, the political revolution not only threatened to distract people from recognizing the need for something new but, worse, created a political crowd fuelled by the belief that external changes would make everything better. For Kierkegaard, it was precisely the church’s responsibility to answer this threat and to ‘do battle’ with the revolutionaries, as it was only the clergy who could ‘split up “the crowd” to turn it into individuals’.38 However, it did not take long for Kierkegaard to recognize that this was not going to happen. As he writes from 1849, Then I was horrified to see what was understood by a Christian state (this I saw especially in 1848); I saw how the ones who were supposed to rule, both in Church and State, hid themselves like cowards while barbarism boldly and brazenly raged; and I experienced how a truly unselfish and God-fearing endeavor (and my endeavor as an author was that) is rewarded in the Christian state. That seals my fate. Now it is up to my contemporaries how they will list the cost of being a Christian, how terrifying they will make it . . . But if what one sees all over Europe is Christendom, a Christian state, then I propose to start here in Denmark to list the price for being a Christian in such a way that the whole concept – state church, official appointments, livelihood – bursts open.39

36 37 38 39

JP 6:6721, p. 374 / SKS 24, NB23:6, p. 208. JP 6:6370, p. 131 / SKS 21, NB10:89, pp. 302–3. JP 6:6256, p. 246 / SKP X 6 B 40, n.d., 1848(?)–49. JP 6:6444, p. 179 / SKS 22, NB11:233, pp. 140–2.

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This journal entry is extremely important as it not only shows Kierkegaard’s frustration with the situation but reveals in its final sentence much of the content of his later authorship and final attack. Already here Kierkegaard threatens that the extremity of his description of Christianity will not just be scandalous but will bring the state church and its entire clerical apparatus to its knees.

Indirectness and the New Pseudonym Indeed, Kierkegaard intended to follow through with this threat by publishing the texts of The Point of View for My Work as an Author, The Sickness unto Death, and pieces that would come to make up Practice in Christianity, under his own name in one go, before then disappearing from view to a rural vocation.40 However, in fear of being considered a hypocrite for not embodying the message himself – an element of his psychological ‘thorn in the flesh’ that he carried with him throughout his life – Kierkegaard relented and instead used a ‘new pseudonym’, Anti-Climacus, to raise the definition of Christianity to its height without incurring the wrath of his anxiety.41 And it is particularly in Practice in Christianity that we can see something of his threat carried out.

Practice in Christianity According to Anti-Climacus, New Testament Christianity and the Danish Church have nothing in common. In contrast to Christ’s sufferings and the extremity of his life at the hands of the world, the church has focused exclusively on his triumph over the world. As he comments of the church’s preaching, ‘we hear nothing but sermons that could more appropriately end with “Hurrah” than with “Amen”.’42 The point is not that what the church proclaims is necessarily wrong, but that in order not to isolate the congregation that pays its wage, the clergy have been entirely selective in eschewing the deeply challenging character of Christ’s life and works.43 This effect is further cemented by the clergy only preaching by way of interesting ‘observations’ about the Bible, rather than considering how they themselves should embody its message and so also the congregation.44 Through its preaching, therefore, the church has converted itself into the ‘church triumphant’ on earth, with a Christ who affirms the status quo and the fulfilment of humankind through its earthly life.45 So successful is its delusion that everyone is now considered to be Christian from birth.46 For Anti-Climacus, however, there can only be the ‘church militant’ – a church that continues to struggle and suffer in its imitation of Christ. Where the church triumphant considers itself to have reached its divine fulfilment in the world, so the church militant is in a state of becoming, accompanied by the fear and trembling of true faith as it moves forward in struggle against the world.47 To make his point as clear as possible, Kierkegaard compares the church militant to the idea of community. The church militant is made up of single individuals who, in imitation 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

JP 6:6327, p. 108 / SKS 21, NB9:78, pp. 248–51. Cf. JP 6:6445, p. 180 / SKS 22, NB12:7, p. 149. PC, 107. PC, 197. PC, 234–5. Cf. PC, 207–15. PC, 211, 252–3. PC, 88, 211, 232.

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of Christ, experience this life as a time of testing and unrest. The ‘congregation’, however, is a state of rest and fulfilment, and so will only exist in the next life as an eschatological possibility – ‘the gathering of single individuals who endured in the struggle and passed the test’.48 Kierkegaard is not here trying to annihilate human relationships for the individual. The church militant remains in some way ‘the church’. He is rather emphasizing again the dialectical nature of these relationships that unite ‘at an ideal distance’, and direct the individual further towards God. Where static or fulfilled ‘fellowship’ may be something to expect for the future, so the church, and perhaps also human relationships, retain their responsibility to facilitate the individual’s becoming. The dialectical quality is confirmed at the end of Practice in Christianity where Anti-Climacus offers the following relational dedication: We pray for those who have experienced what is the most beautiful earthly meaning of this earthly life, for those who in love have found each other; we pray for the lovers that they may not promise each other more than they are able to keep, and even if they are able to keep it, we pray that they may not promise each other too much in love, lest their love become an obstacle to your drawing them to yourself, that instead it might help them all the more to that end.49 Despite its critical tone, therefore, Anti-Climacus balances his message with an appreciation of the individual’s earthly life and needs. He makes clear that he is not saying that everyone must necessarily suffer like Christ. However, he still considers it to be the primary mark of imitation. Recalling the journal entry from 1838 cited at the start of our discussion, Kierkegaard reaffirms a form of spiritual hierarchy when he states, I have never asserted that every Christian is a martyr, or that no one was a true Christian who did not become a martyr, even though I think that every true Christian should – and here I include myself – in order to be a Christian, make a humble admission that he has been let off far more easily than true Christians in the strictest sense, and he should make this admission so that, if I may put it this way, the Christian order of rank may not be confused.50 What is required of each person is not necessarily suffering but that each individual ‘is to confess honestly before God where he is so that he still might worthily accept the grace that is offered to every imperfect person – that is, to everyone’.51 If anything else is required, God will make this known to him. Even for the clergy the same rule applies. When critiquing the nature of preaching as ‘observation’, he argues that if the priest cannot live up to what he proclaims he must be ‘honest enough to confess about himself that he is not that’.52

Mynster and a Defence of the Established Order If we return to his threat from 1849, despite the extremity of the message in Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard clearly held back. The state church and its clergy did not ‘burst open’. In fact, according to his journals, Practice in Christianity was not designed

48 49 50 51 52

PC, 223. PC, 261. PC, 226–7. PC, 67. PC, 235.

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to undermine the ‘established order’, but rather to affirm it through its critique.53 The point was that at this stage Kierkegaard felt that the church still had the ability to reverse the effects of the revolution by making an admission about Denmark’s spiritual anaemia. And it was precisely in the figure of Mynster that Kierkegaard found someone who might speak for the whole church. For Kierkegaard, Mynster’s reputation was so strong that he was ‘a representation who carries a country’, someone who ‘carried a whole age’.54 Consequently, if he were to make an admission, then truth might return to the state of Denmark. That Kierkegaard felt Mynster might do so can perhaps be understood when we consider their profound similarities. In 1839, Kierkegaard had reflected that the church needs ‘a preacher like Mynster who always leads everything back to the individual; that is where the battle must be’.55 And even later in 1848, Kierkegaard felt that Mynster ‘proclaimed true Christianity’, even if he did so in an un-Christian way by reaping the reward of a comfortable life from it.56 Kierkegaard, therefore, continued to read and hear Mynster’s sermons for his own edification throughout his life. So, theologically, there was clearly some affinity. However, the same may be true politically. When Kierkegaard went on one of his not infrequent visits to Mynster a little while after the publication of Practice in Christianity, he reported afterwards, We went on talking. He was in agreement with me, and what I said about the government was fully his opinion. We spoke a little about that. I said it was not so very pleasant to have to say such things and therefore no one was willing to do it, but they had to be said, and so I had done it.57 We don’t know more about the precise details of this conversation, but in his memoirs Mynster reflects many of Kierkegaard’s own sentiments. Mynster equally believed the events of 1848 to have been a ‘catastrophe’. Bearing marked similarity to Two Ages he comments that the spirit of the age was to ignore the mildness of the Danish context, and rather to allow an ‘unprincipled aspiring after changes’ to lead the way. In particular he comments of these revolutionaries that ‘they thought they could achieve by external organizations what, however, can only be won by internal development’.58 And Mynster was clearly no admirer of the new constitution or the way in which the church was made to stand under the state. If we consider Kierkegaard’s belief that the clergy were now essentially civil servants, Mynster highlights the ‘intolerable burden’ of the Government’s proposals for the church that had nothing to do with the clergy’s actual calling. Despite his reputation, Mynster even reveals some internal turmoil. He describes many in the clergy as being extremely favourable towards the constitution, and so considered him as someone ‘unable to keep up with the times’, or a ‘ruin from a lost time’.59 However, he concludes that ‘when upright clergymen rightly felt the dangerous threat to true and sound Christianity and our ecclesiastical community, so the majority have again joined me, but unfortunately seem to expect more of me than I am capable.’60 Although it seems

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

JP 6:6699, p. 360 / SKS 24, NB21:153, p. 94. JP 6:6854, p. 492 / SKP XI 3 B 15 March 1854; JP 6:6853, p. 491 / SKS 25, NB28:56, pp. 262–4; cf. TM, 7. JP 5:5408, p. 136 / SKS 18, EE:165, p. 57. JP 6:6171, p. 14 / SKS 20, NB5:77, p. 404. JP 6:6777, p. 421 / SKS 24, NB24:121, pp. 397–8; cf. TM, 257. J. P. Mynster, Meddelelser om mit Levnet (Kiøbenhavn: Gyldendal, 1854), 289 – my translation. Ibid., 290 – my translation. Ibid., 291 – my translation.

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unlikely that Kierkegaard might have been included in this last group, it is curious that Mynster writes these words at around the same time as Kierkegaard’s visits, and one can only wonder whether Mynster was aware of the task he had been set. Either way, that Kierkegaard still had hope for the church is not perhaps so strange given Mynster’s similar sentiments towards the revolution and state church, as well as the need for interiority over exterior changes.

A New Directness Before moving on to consider Kierkegaard’s ‘Attack’, we must briefly consider two final works of this period: For Self-Examination and the posthumously published Judge for Yourself!, both of which follow on from Practice in Christianity but were published under his own name. Ironically, this movement into direct communication came at the hand of Mynster. In May 1851, Kierkegaard had read one of Mynster’s sermons entitled, ‘Our Duty to be Content with God’s Grace’, on 2 Corinthians 12.61 In particular, he was struck by Mynster’s exposition of the phrase, ‘for my power is made perfect in weakness’. Where Kierkegaard had been held back from presenting the height of Christianity under his own name due to his own ‘thorn in the flesh’, so Mynster’s emphasis on God’s grace had somehow released Kierkegaard to venture out through his thorn rather than to be held back by it.62

For Self-Examination Although the method had changed, Kierkegaard’s message had not been much affected. In both works we find many of the same themes coming through, such as the profound contrast between the form of Christ and Christendom, the relationship between suffering and imitation, the opposition between the crowd and the individual and the church’s affirmation of a triumphalist gospel. And again, the issue of the need for an honest admission is central. However, what is particularly interesting is not the similarities between For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! but rather their differences. At the end of For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard presents something of a hopeful message, and does so by reference to previous works. Drawing upon Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard uses Abraham as an exemplar of someone who, in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, actually sacrifices his selfishness and hopes and desires for this world. But in dying also to the security of his own understanding, he receives a ‘hope against hope’, which in turn gives birth to true love from the Spirit. And here Kierkegaard directly references his exposition in Works of Love,63 where true love (Kjerlighed) is given for this life, and is embodied in the dialectical relationship where God acts as the middle term.64 Similarly, in Fear and Trembling the eternal acts as the middle term through which Abraham receives Isaac back again. In For Self-Examination suffering in imitation is by no means mitigated, but faith, hope and love are the life-giving gifts of Pentecost for this life.65

61

62 63 64 65

J. P. Mynster, Prædikener paa alle Søn- og Hellig-Dage i Aaret, vol. 1, 4th edn (Kiøbenhavn: Gyldendal, 1845), 191–203 – my translation. JP 6:6768, p. 416 / SKS 24, NB24:73, p. 365; JP 6:6769, pp. 416–17 / SKS 24, NB24:74, pp. 365–7. FSE, 83. FSE, 78. FSE, 85.

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Judge for Yourself! Judge for Yourself! offers a far more extreme message with little relational affirmation. In particular, it attacks the state church and the legions of waged clergy to argue that Christianity now no longer exists in Christendom. Although Judge for Yourself! includes the need for an honest admission, Kierkegaard here goes further and states, ‘Christianity has reached the point where it must be said: So now I am going to begin all over again from the beginning.’66 In For Self-Examination Kierkegaard had stated that he was not proclaiming tumult or the overthrowing of everything.67 And yet, in Judge for Yourself! a more radical position is suggested in ‘a halt’ needing to be brought. The precise details of this ‘halt’ are left unstated. However, what Kierkegaard makes crystal clear in both works is that he has no intention of becoming a reformer.68 These ideas reflect Kierkegaard’s position outlined in an open letter, published in Faedrelandet on 31 January 1851. Here Kierkegaard declares that his authorship has only ever been concerned for the ‘inward deepening of Christianity’, and not a single word of it has suggested a proposal for an external change such as the separation between church and state, or that this might be of any help.69 Although he tentatively confirms the possibility of a collision with the state through the prompting of conscience,70 he equally states that ‘Christianity means precisely this: in self-concern to develop an indifference towards externals.’71

III. THE MOMENT AND FINAL ATTACK Following the publication of For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard stopped writing. There are many potential reasons behind this silence, including his desire to heighten the impact an attack might have after a prolonged absence.72 But one reason at least was his desire to give Mynster the opportunity to make his admission. However, when Mynster died in January 1854, silence was no longer necessary. And Kierkegaard was given the perfect impetus to begin his work again. In a eulogy to Mynster, Martensen – a clear favourite to succeed Mynster – described him as a ‘witness to the truth’. No more provocative statement could perhaps have been made. For not only was Mynster the embodiment of the Christendom that stood in direct opposition to authentic Christianity, but this was a term that Kierkegaard had used throughout his authorship since 1847 to stand for the martyr who dies at its hands. According to Josiah Thompson, the term Sandhedsvidne was coined by Kierkegaard precisely for this purpose.73 And now Christendom was attempting to appropriate it.

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

JFY, 130. FSE, 20. Cf. JFY, 211–13. COR, 53. COR, 57–8. COR, 59. JP 1:615, p. 249 / SKS 26, NB36:24, pp. 422–3. Thompson, Kierkegaard, 219. Thompson does not provide much by way of evidence except that the word does not appear in dictionaries at the time. Whether he is right or not, it is clear that Kierkegaard associated himself with the word’s true interpretation.

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Attack on the Church It is perhaps not surprising that Kierkegaard did not publish Judge for Yourself! as it bears striking similarity in content and tone to this final period of writing. Kierkegaard began first in articles published in Faedrelandet, before then moving to his own pamphlets, entitled The Moment. Here we again find the profound juxtaposition between a New Testament Christianity, defined by the suffering of Christ and his truth-witnesses, and Christendom, encapsulated in the ease of society and its professional clergy. And it is the clergy that now receive some of his strongest words, praised perhaps for their role in the civil service,74 but condemned for the hypocrisy of their sacred performance. Such people are ‘lie-pastors’75 and ‘huckstering knaves’,76 who are motivated more by a fear of people than of God,77 by their egotism and desire for financial advantage than by their love of gospel truth.78 Indeed, Kierkegaard argues that when it is the priest’s responsibility to ‘do everything to make every human being eternally responsible for every hour he lives’, so their existence has now become a crucial element in maintaining the illusion within society that everything is okay.79 In all Denmark, therefore, there cannot be an honest priest whilst this crime against Christianity continues.80 Official Christianity is not just a ‘playing at Christianity’,81 but is ‘a ludicrousness, an indecency, Christianly a scandal’,82 because it has abolished true Christianity and in its worship makes a fool of God.83 In response to the situation, Kierkegaard calls for two things. The first is, once again, an honest admission from the church that they are not true Christianity, nor that they want to be.84 This is the ‘mildest path’ to undermining hypocrisy. However, it must equate to ‘taking down the sign’, and stating clearly that this is not the true church.85 Kierkegaard further suggests that under these circumstances all that should remain of its liturgy is a prayer, a song and the reading of a New Testament passage followed by silence.86 As has been discussed, the church and its liturgical responsibility were extremely important to Kierkegaard. And yet now every element had become entirely corrupted. Preaching amounted to observations, confession was something avoided for fear of its earnestness,87 the Eucharist became clouded in intellectual mystery in order to avoid its association with Christ’s suffering and imitation,88 and baptism was simply a means to citizenship. Consequently, although an admission might be theoretically possible, Kierkegaard’s second requirement is not for the church, but for everyone else – stop attending.89 To continue to go to church is to incur guilt for participating in this criminal activity towards God.90 In keeping with his previous writing, however, Kierkegaard 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

TM, 47. TM, 345. TM, 340. TM, 137; cf. 107. TM, 135. TM, 350. TM, 255; cf. 70. TM, 32. TM, 60. TM, 97. TM, 47, 97, 226, 292; cf. 15, 28 TM, 61. TM, 132. Cf. JP 1:598, p. 242 / SKS 24, NB22:81, p. 145. TM, 232. TM, 49, 73, 235, 312. TM, 131.

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remains adamant that he is not a reformer, and that there really is nothing left to reform.91 Consequently, he is not trying to replace Christendom with an alternative, but simply to stop an institution that is actively drawing people away from God. Although the lines are not clear-cut, this may be considered as an act of ‘negative reformation’, but no more.92

Attack on Community Kierkegaard’s attack on the state church, although scandalous in its public audacity, does not present much that is different from the earlier works we have considered. Much of this was written in the few years after the calamitous revolution. And even his desire for the state church to fall, hinted at in ‘the halt’ of Judge for Yourself!, was revealed in his threat from 1849.93 What is perhaps more striking, however, is the way in which a one-dimensional ‘New Testament Christianity’ is presented in stark conflict with the possibility of normal human relationships. And it is this that particularly jars with his earlier work, and is perhaps most crucial to our ecclesial understanding. If we recall Kierkegaard’s journal from 1838 near the start of this chapter, where the rejection of the state church does not rule out an ecclesiology per se, so an attack on the community does. According to The Moment, in imitation of Christ, a true Christian not only suffers but must become utterly isolated, as by loving God he must also hate himself and the world that stands against God. The passage Kierkegaard often returns to is not one concerning Christ’s passion, but rather Lk. 14.26, and our need to hate those closest to us. As Kierkegaard summarizes, ‘Christianity in the New Testament is to love God in hatred of humankind, in hatred of oneself and thereby of all other people, hating father, mother, one’s own child, wife, etc., the most powerful expression for the most agonizing isolation.’94 If the church was really attuned to New Testament Christianity, it would not marry people but rather do everything in its power to block their union,95 because the ‘much extolled Christian family is itself, Christianly, a falsehood’.96 Indeed, Kierkegaard argues that if a true Christian falls in love he must embrace the height of his feeling in order to give up the beloved and place all his passion now onto God.97 To be a true Christian means to be unhappy in this life. So extreme is Kierkegaard’s message that he comments that the command to love one’s enemy should perhaps be considered in relation to God rather than another human as it must appear to the true individual that it is really God who is his enemy in requiring of him such sacrifice and suffering.98

An Ecclesial Corrective or a Bitter End? When coupled with such a radical opposition to the structures of normal human life, Kierkegaard’s attack on the state church can appear like the angry ramblings of a man 91 92

93 94 95 96 97 98

TM, 39. Cf. Matthew D. Kirkpatrick, Attacks on Christendom in a World Come of Age (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), 183–4, 220–1; Aaron Edwards, ‘Taking the Single Individual Back to Church: The Possibility of a Kierkegaardian Ecclesiology ’, Theology Today 72, no. 4 (2016): 431–46 [439]. JP 6:6444, p. 179 / SKS 22, NB11:233, pp. 140–2. TM, 184. TM, 245–8. TM, 252. TM, 184. TM, 177.

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near the end of his life, against a society and church that had jilted him. Indeed, the extremity of The Moment is overshadowed by his journal entries where he attacks both Luther and the entirety of Protestantism for having allowed itself as the corrective to become normative.99 Even the apostles are considered to be out of keeping with a true interpretation of Christ for having converted so many in a single day at Pentecost rather than producing the single individual.100 And concerning human relationships we find a desperate reflection in his very final entry on 25 September 1855. Here he comments that we have all been brought into life through sin, and so our punishment corresponds to our guilt: ‘to be deprived of all zest for life, to be led into the most extreme life-weariness’. What pleases God above all else is ‘a human being who in the last lap of his life, when God seemingly changes into sheer cruelty and with the most cruelly devised cruelty does everything to deprive him of all zest for life, nevertheless continues to believe that God is love, that it is out of love that God does it. Such a human then becomes an angel.’101 Given the tone of his attack and later journal entries, it is no surprise that Thompson comments that by the end of his life Kierkegaard had finally forsaken this world.102 And John Caputo, in reflecting on this journal entry, is entirely correct when he states that in the face of such a seemingly ‘grim, even masochistic’ perspective, ‘Readers of Kierkegaard’s last writings will have a hard time avoiding the conclusion that Kierkegaard had fallen into exactly the despair he warned against, a despair not of the infinite and eternal but of the finite and temporal.’103 A straightforward reading of these main texts should perhaps lead us to this conclusion: Kierkegaard’s writing becomes more and more extreme and despondent as a reflection of his own increasingly bitter internal state, ending not just with a rejection of the church and state, but with all that we consider makes us human.

The Corrective However, there may be a little more to it. At various different points in his journals, Kierkegaard describes his later authorship as a ‘corrective’ to Christendom.104 Where Christendom has wandered into secularity, so Kierkegaard believed it might be brought back again by presenting an equally extreme alternative that emphasizes the element that has been missed out – suffering imitation.105 The corrective must always, therefore, be itself a deficient position in order to create this effect, and must never become normative. But, unlike a Hegelian synthesis, the two positions remain in some way intact and hold each other in balance. In a journal entry from 1852, for instance, Kierkegaard describes the martyr within society counterbalancing its carefree understanding of God’s love with his own: ‘The bird on the twig, the lily in the field, the deer in the forest, the fish in the sea, the countless crowds of happy humans jubilate: God is love. But underneath, supporting,

99 100 101 102 103 104

105

Cf. JP 3:2550, p. 99 / SKS 25, NB30:22, pp. 399–401; JP 3:3618, p. 673 / SKS 25, NB29:38, p. 320. Cf. JP 2:2056, p. 428 / SKS 25, NB30:19, pp. 397–8. JP 6:6969, p. 575 / SKS 27, Papir 591, pp. 695–8. Thompson, Kierkegaard, 216. John D. Caputo, How to Read Kierkegaard (London: Granta Books, 2007), 112. For more on the corrective, see Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, ‘Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Imitation’, in A Kierkegaard Critique, ed. Howard A. Johnson and Niels Thulstrup (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), 266–85; Johnson, ‘Kierkegaard and the Church’. JP 1:707, p. 331 / SKS 22, NB12:115, pp. 208–9; JP 1:708, p. 331 / SKS 24, NB23:15, p. 212; JP 6:6467, p. 188 / SKS 22, NB12:97, pp. 194–5; JP 6:6693, p. 358 / SKS 24, NB21:122, p. 74.

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as it were, all these sopranos as the bass part does, sounds the de profundis from the sacrificed ones: God is love.’106 That Kierkegaard is deliberately presenting a skewed or selective message can perhaps be substantiated when we compare his final attack to his earlier work. In For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard draws on both Fear and Trembling and Works of Love to describe the dialectical foundations of authentic relationships – whether that be through God, love or eternity as the middle term. However, in The Moment, one side of the dialectic has been removed, and there can only be relationship to God by the socially isolated individual. This is particularly pronounced in relation to the treatment of Fear and Trembling. Where in For Self-Examination it is the knight of faith that is used, so in The Moment it is the knight of infinite resignation. As Johannes de Silentio describes, in the face of God’s command to sacrifice Isaac, the knight of faith gives up his reason and has ‘faith for this life’ to believe that he will receive Isaac back again.107 By contrast, the knight of infinite resignation takes the full weight of his love and expresses it spiritually by renouncing it. He places his earthly hopes onto eternity and finds peace through his pain.108 Such an individual is to be praised for his obedience because such an act requires more-than-human powers as a movement of the spirit.109 However, it is not faith. As Johannes de Silentio summarizes, ‘it is great to give up one’s desire, but greater to stick to it after giving it up; it is great to grasp hold of the eternal but greater to stick to the temporal after having given it up’.110 When we turn to The Moment (and indeed his final journal entry), the ‘true Christian’ appears to make a movement of infinite resignation, but not of faith. As he states, ‘According to the New Testament, what does it mean to become loved by God? It is to become, humanly speaking, unhappy in this life yet blessedly expecting an eternal happiness – according to the New Testament, God, who is spirit, cannot love a human being in another way.’111 It is particularly noticeable that both Fear and Trembling and The Moment make pronounced use of Lk. 14.26. And yet in The Moment it has been divorced from the second movement of faith back into the world.112 The corrective argument clearly has some foundation. However, Caputo’s criticism cannot be so easily overcome. As Kierkegaard writes in 1849, I must now take care, or rather God will take care of me, so that I do not go astray by all too one-sidedly staring at Christ as the prototype . . . But dialectical as my nature is, in the passion of the dialectical it always seems as if the contrasting thought were not present at all – and so the one side comes first of all and most strongly.113

106

107 108 109 110 111 112 113

JP 1:709, p. 331 / SKS 25, NB26:47, pp. 51–2. The dynamic of this corrective is perhaps illuminated in the light of The Sickness unto Death. Here Anti-Climacus argues that the self is made up of opposing positions of the eternal and temporal, which are held together in balance by a relation that relates to itself (cf. SUD, 13–14). Both sides never collapse into each other but remain distinct, held together by God’s providence. The self is therefore like a gyroscope that only remains balanced by the constantly relating forces that are acting upon it. FT, 53. FT, 73–4. FT, 74–6. FT, 52. TM, 213. FT, 99–102. JP 2:1852, p. 320 / SKS 21, NB10:165, p. 337.

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Even if it can be shown that Kierkegaard initially intended his material to be an extreme corrective, it is difficult to prove that he had not convinced himself that it was the whole truth by the end. However, there is perhaps evidence to suggest the corrective remained firmly in view. On the most superficial level, it is clear that Kierkegaard is revealing an ‘exegetical partiality’ in presenting a version of ‘New Testament Christianity’ that clearly ignores vast swathes of the New Testament that offer a far more ecclesial and relational Christianity.114 If Kierkegaard believed his later writings to be the whole truth then he is not just rejecting state, church and community, but also his theological integrity. It should also be said that circumstantial evidence paints a rather different picture of Kierkegaard than of the infinitely resigned martyr who has rejected all human relationships. According to his good friend, Hans Brøchner, even at the end Kierkegaard maintained a ‘loving concern for others’, and a ‘gentleness, friendliness, even playfulness’.115 Such a picture of loving engagement is equally described in the recollections of Kierkegaard’s niece, Henrietta Lund, and his half-nephew, Troels Fredrik Troels-Lund, both of whom visited him on his deathbed.116 Such arguments are clearly important. However, if we consider our overall discussion, it is the corrective argument that perhaps makes more sense of the way in which Kierkegaard’s attack unfolded. As this chapter has argued, Kierkegaard’s last period was certainly scandalous but should not be seen as a tempestuous outburst at the end of his life. Much of the content of his later writings derives from the period just after 1848. But elements of his attack can be seen even earlier. In 1846, for instance, Kierkegaard had already described the effect the clergy’s pay would have on their preaching.117 And in 1847, he acknowledged that ‘Christianity teaches that the world is evil’, and that he might be called to martyrdom at the hands of a Christendom that had lost all vestiges of Christianity.118 It is also worth noting that although For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! were written at around the same time, their tone is very different, suggesting that Kierkegaard was not growing more frustrated but was calculating the tone and timing of his work. What changes for Kierkegaard, therefore, is not necessarily what he believed to be true, but rather when and how he should reveal it. If we recall, in 1849 Kierkegaard had already threatened to raise Christianity to its height in order to make the state church ‘burst open’, even though this would only be fulfilled in The Moment. The evidence suggests a strategy by which Kierkegaard made his writing increasingly more extreme as it become more and more apparent that his work was not having its desired effect.119 In addition, this chapter has suggested that instead of a sudden theological outburst, Kierkegaard strategically removed the alleviating, relational elements from his previous thought to make them into the extreme and unbalanced corrective he felt was necessary against Christendom’s cheap faith.

114 115 116 117 118 119

Cf. Edwards, ‘Taking the Single Individual Back to Church’, 434–5. Kirmmse, Encounters, 252. Kirmmse, Encounters, 172, 189. JP 3:2767, p. 219 / SKS 18, JJ:485, pp. 300–2. WA, 76. In particular, the church remained largely silent despite his most provocative attempts.

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CONCLUSION It should be noted that a corrective is not designed to destroy something, but to rebalance it. If we consider his threat from 1849, therefore, it becomes clear that the corrective was never aimed at the state church as corrective, but rather at the concept of community. As we have noted, it is here that the scandalous nature of Kierkegaard’s attack really lies. And yet, as we recall from the journal entry from 1838, it is equally here that we find the heart of Kierkegaard’s ecclesiology. The church, for Kierkegaard, serves a purpose, and its form is only relevant in so far as this aim is achieved – the formation of the individual. For Kierkegaard, such liturgical practices as preaching, confession, communion and baptism were extremely important towards this aim. But Kierkegaard’s allegiance to the form of church within the established order was founded on its ability to enact these practices, and potentially reverse the effects of the external revolution of 1848 that undermined an internal one.120 Once it was no longer able to do this – and actually worked towards the reverse – it needed to be brought down. In The Moment, the state church was indeed attacked and hopefully destroyed, but this was not the primary aim of the corrective. Rather, Kierkegaard’s presentation of the most isolated Christian individual was intended to correct human relationships in order to create the true church as authentic community. If we are to look for the balanced position that rests at the eye of the storm the corrective creates, it remains the ecclesial perspective represented in the 1838 journal entry – of the church as a community whose sole purpose is to draw normal people towards the ideal through the dialectical nature of its liturgical practices and relationships. What this suggests is that quite apart from finding a profound departure from, and perhaps rejection of, his earlier writing – which I think we are required to do if the corrective is not in place – we find in Kierkegaard’s later writing evidence of the continuity within his work. And perhaps we even find the surprising conclusion that he held the same position about the church at the very end as he did in our journal entry for 1838. Although he is sometimes grudging in his admission of this requirement, most people need the church to draw them closer to individuality before God. There are some who do not need community and can be true individuals in isolation before God. But the church as community remains the middle term, whatever form it may take, that allows us to stand before God. It is perhaps not surprising that commentators such as Law and Kirmmse have argued that Kierkegaard ultimately presents an anti-ecclesial and anticlerical position.121 Even for Holm, who defends a less radical perspective, the question remains not why Kierkegaard stopped attending church but rather why he attended it in the first place.122 However, what has been argued here is that the profound importance of the church as a concept remains throughout Kierkegaard’s work and is something of a lynchpin to understand his religious authorship. In particular, if the corrective can be accepted, it offers us a way of seeing the unifying elements of Kierkegaard’s thought across much of his lifetime rather than their disparity.

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One should perhaps see Kierkegaard’s deathbed request to receive the Eucharist from a layman as representing this broader theological perspective rather than as an act of revolt against the state church. David R. Law, ‘Kierkegaard’s Anti-Ecclesiology ’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 7, no. 2 (2007): 86–108; Bruce H. Kirmmse, ‘The Thunderstorm: Kierkegaard’s Ecclesiology ’, Faith and Philosophy 17, no. 1 (January 2000): 87–102. Holm, ‘The Church’, 127.

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FURTHER READING Edwards, Aaron. ‘Taking the Single Individual Back to Church: The Possibility of a Kierkegaardian Ecclesiology ’. Theology Today 72, no. 4 (2016): 431–46. Holm, Anders. ‘Kierkegaard and the Church’. In The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, edited by John Lippitt and George Pattison, 112–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kirkpatrick, Matthew D. ‘Sociological Categories and the Journey to Selfhood: From the Crowd to Community ’. In Kierkegaard and Political Theology, edited by Silas Morgan and Roberto Sirvent, 341–57. Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2018. Kirmmse, Bruce H. ‘The Thunderstorm: Kierkegaard’s Ecclesiology ’. Faith and Philosophy 17, no.1 (January 2000): 87–102. Plekon, Michael. ‘Kierkegaard, the Church and Theology of Golden Age Denmark’. The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 34, no. 2 (April 1983): 245–66.

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PART TWO

Kierkegaard’s Theological Biography

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CHAPTER SIX

Kierkegaard the Theology Student GEORGE PATTISON

INTRODUCTION On 30 October 1830, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was confirmed by its Rector ‘as a member of the academic community of the University of Copenhagen’.1 But although the letter of confirmation also expressed hopes for the new student’s ‘happiness and good fortune’, most of what has been written about Kierkegaard’s student years suggests that happiness was occasional and good fortune intermittent. However, this article will not be exploring the personal highs and lows of Kierkegaard’s student years (often of greatest interest to his biographers), and is focused instead on the scope and character of his theological studies with particular reference to the evidence of his lecture and reading notes. These are sources that must be used with care. For example, Kierkegaard attended a number of courses for which no notes survive, whether because he did not take any or because they suffered the fate of most student lecture notes. Although it might be possible in several cases to reconstruct the content of these courses from the published works of his teachers and then examine whether or to what extent they are reflected in Kierkegaard’s own theological development, such a procedure would inevitably be speculative and, in any case, since attendance records were not kept, we do not know which lectures in any given course Kierkegaard actually attended. A further complicating factor is the then current practice of amanuenses taking lecture notes which were then sold to students. At least one set of notes in Kierkegaard’s hand (discussed further below) seems to be a transcription of such notes and another set, not in his hand, was found among his papers. These do not prove that he either did or did not attend the lectures in question, but they do signal the need for caution. Indeed, we cannot even presume that the courses for which he took quite extensive notes were really the ones that most interested or affected him. What follows, therefore, is not a definitive picture of the theology that Kierkegaard learned at Copenhagen University, but it is indicative of the kinds of topics, approaches and emphases that he encountered and therefore gives some insight into the scope and depth of his theological learning.

1

LD, x.

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I. KIERKEGAARD’S UNIVERSITY STUDIES Accounts of Kierkegaard’s student years suggest that he rather quickly lost interest in theology and only returned to it after a number of vagabond years given over to the kind of lifestyle reflected in the writings of the aesthete ‘A’. In March 1835, his brother Peter wrote in his diary that ‘Søren does not seem to be studying for his examination at all now’.2 In a letter applying for examination Kierkegaard himself states that ‘inasmuch as I daily grew farther and farther away from theology and in the course of time with all sails set slipped into the study of philosophy, which then had won special acceptance among us, I became certain that I could not satisfy the demands of theology nor it mine, and I left it completely’.3 His return to theology, he continues, is connected with the obligation he felt to his deceased father to resume the studies he ‘had long ago abandoned’ and ‘consigned to oblivion’.4 Of course, such documents do not have to be taken at face value and his journals and notebooks show a much greater interest in literature than in philosophy, with long entries on the troubadours and on Don Juan, Faust and the Wandering Jew.5 This intermission is also the period when he is writing his Gilleleie journal (1835) and the so-called Faustian letters (1836–7), perhaps most plausibly read as attempts at epistolary novellas. It is also striking that his return to theology (in 1837–8) seems also to have been the point at which he began to engage with the philosophical questions that are at the centre of several of his later published works, more of which later. In the same letter Kierkegaard also observes that after passing the preliminary examinations ‘with a first with honors’ he ‘directed [his] soul and mind to theology and decided that [he] would put special emphasis on the mastery of the exegetical and historical disciplines’, going on to stress his ‘diligent’ lecture attendance before the drift away to philosophy. His academic record confirms this ‘diligent’ beginning. In the first preliminary examination in April 1831, he achieved laudabilis (with praise) in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and history, and laudabilis prae ceteris (what we might call in the UK a starred first) in mathematics. In the second preliminary examination at the end of October of that year, he scored laudabilis prae ceteris in theoretical philosophy, practical philosophy, physics and higher mathematics. The petition for examination also mentions Kierkegaard’s high school graduation record, and this too shows a mix of laudabilis (in Latin, Hebrew, Religion, Geography, Arithmetic, Geometry and German) and laudabilis prae ceteris scores (in Danish writing, Greek, History and French).6 All of this reveals proficiency in a curriculum typical of its time, with an emphasis on classical languages and mathematics, but also German and French. At the point of starting his specifically theological studies, then, Kierkegaard had a thorough grounding in the relevant biblical languages and in Latin that was still a medium of academic study and examination.

2

3 4 5

6

Cited in Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). LD, 10. LD, 10. Even Kierkegaard’s philosophical studies were not without connection to theology, however. In the winter semester of 1833/4 he attends lectures by F. C. Sibbern on ‘The Philosophy of Christianity’, perhaps the most significant of the philosophers then teaching at Copenhagen, and the following years are probably also the period of his friendship with Poul Martin Møller, whom he would describe in the dedication of The Concept of Anxiety as ‘the confidante of Socrates’ and ‘the interpreter of Aristotle’ but who also wrote a treatise on immortality that Kierkegaard greatly valued (see CUP, 172). Both Sibbern and Møller were also novelists, and Møller was admired as a poet. LD, 7–9.

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There are many lacunae in the record of Kierkegaard’s studies, but Joakim Garff notes that Kierkegaard was enrolled for H. N. Clausen’s lectures on the synoptic gospels in the winter semester of 1832/3 and the following summer semester continued with Clausen’s lectures on New Testament hermeneutics, as well as M. H. Hohlenberg’s lectures on Genesis and Isaiah. In the following year, he seems to have attended Clausen’s course on the Acts of the Apostles and C. T. Engelstoft’s lectures on John’s Gospel.7 In the winter semester of 1833/4 and running on into the summer semester of 1834 Kierkegaard took very extensive notes on Clausen’s comprehensive lectures on Dogmatics and also in 1834 made some shorter but significant reading notes on F. D. E. Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre, which he studied with H. L. Martensen (later a primary target of his attacks on speculative philosophy and, in 1854–5, against the established church). During this period, he translated a considerable number of New Testament texts into Latin,8 presumably in preparation for the examinations in exegesis that required students to translate passages of the original Greek into Latin and then write a commentary on the text, also in Latin.9 There are also a variety of reading notes from this period relating to Church History and exegetical matters, among the most extensive of which are P. Marheineke’s history of the German Reformation, J. C. Lindberg on the symbolic books of the Danish Church, S. J. Stenersen on the Reformation, L. I. Rückert on Ephesians, L. Usteri’s study of Pauline theology and (perhaps surprisingly) the Catholic speculative philosopher Franz von Baader’s Lectures on Speculative Dogmatics. In addition, there are notes on a variety of theological topics, including predestination and the debate then raging between rationalist and orthodox theologies around the continuing relevance of the baptismal formula renouncing the devil, in which the rationalist position was represented by H. N. Clausen, whose lectures Kierkegaard regularly attended, and the supernaturalist position by N. F. S. Grundtvig.10 For at least two years, then, we see Kierkegaard fairly intensively engaged with a range of theological issues. As to when exactly he broke away from theology and when exactly he returned to it are debatable. Possibly the deaths of his mother and sister in 1834 may have been one factor, although hard evidence is lacking (Martensen’s mother noted that she had never encountered anyone so distraught by a bereavement11). His application for examination links the return to another bereavement, namely, the death of his father in August 1838. However, it seems that he had not only determined on a more serious relation to Christianity prior to that but also that his studies had taken a decidedly theological direction from the winter semester of 1837, when he attended and took extensive notes on Martensen’s lectures ‘On the Introduction to Speculative Dogmatics’. These were the lectures that effectively introduced Hegelianism, or as it was then referred to ‘speculative philosophy’, to Danish theology students. Martensen himself wrote of these lectures that

7 8

9

10

11

Garff, Kierkegaard, 29. These were Acts of the Apostles 1–4 and 24–27, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews and James 1–4.15. When Kierkegaard sought permission to present his master’s thesis On the Concept of Irony in Danish rather than Latin this was clearly not due to any lack of competence but, as he himself argued, because the ‘modern’ subject-matter was not readily treatable in an ancient language. On the Clausen–Grundtvig debate, see Theodor Jørgensen, ‘Grundtvig’s The Church’s Retort – in a Modern Perspective’, in Heritage and Prophecy: Grundtvig and the English-Speaking World, ed. A. M. Allchin, David Jasper, Jens Holger Schjørring and Kenneth Stevenson (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1993), 171–90. See Bruce Kirmmse, Søren Kierkegaard truffet: Et Liv set af hans Samtidige (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1996), 273.

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The effect of my lectures can certainly without exaggeration be characterized as great and exceptional. A new life and feeling showed itself among the theological students. Philosophical studies worked their enticing power, and the students were constantly discussing the highest problems. Certainly there were those, who are unavoidable in such circumstances, for whom the whole thing was just a matter of fashion. Hegel was the man of the moment, and if one had his stamp of approval, one stood at the summit of the age. Others were more serious about Hegel and studied him deeply.12 Whatever we may think of Martensen’s self-satisfaction, the evidence suggests that this is probably a fair assessment. Martensen gave further lectures on ‘Speculative Dogmatics’ in the following semester (1838), for which we have a set of notes probably transcribed by Kierkegaard from the work of an amanuensis (so we do not know whether, despite his interest, he did actually attend the lectures themselves). The arrival of ‘speculative philosophy’ may well relate to Kierkegaard’s comment about how the study of philosophy ‘had won special acceptance among us’, although if that is so, this coincides more with his return to theology than his falling away from it. In any case, following on Martensen’s lectures in the winter semester, 1838 would mark a high point in Kierkegaard’s own interest in speculative philosophy and its implications for Christianity.13 He made very extensive notes on J. E. Erdmann’s Faith and Knowledge (an especially important application of Hegelianism to theology) and on issues relating to D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined (although there is no evidence that he actually read Strauss himself). At the same time, he wrote and published his first book, From the Papers of One Still Living, so he had not entirely abandoned his earlier literary interests either. Indeed, from here on we see Kierkegaard constantly juggling theology, philosophy and literature in such a way that the overall balance and intention often remains disputable. There are relatively few materials directly relating to the final stage of his studies, although there are notes from 1839 to 1840 on confession and communion and his most substantial exegetical notes, on Romans 9–16. His examinations began on 3 July 1840. In biblical studies students were required to translate and comment on Gen. 9.16-29 (the story of Noah and his family after the Flood), including questions inviting comparison between Noah and Dionysius. In the New Testament the text was Rom. 1.113. Questions on church history covered Roman claims to ecclesiastical primacy and both ecumenical and Protestant symbols (creeds and confessions), culminating with the requirement to recite the Augsburg Confession. In moral theology, Kant, Fichte and Luther were the focus of questions on the nature of positive law, duty and the categorical imperative. Kierkegaard passed laudabilis and was ranked fourth of sixty-three in the written examinations, although the examiners also noted that his answers showed ‘far greater maturity and development of thought than any of the others’.14 Given it had taken him ten years to reach this point, this was hardly surprising. However, it was relatively normal at that time for theological studies to take five to seven years and Kierkegaard was not entirely exceptional. Even allowing for his period of disillusion, it is safe to say that between 1830 and 1840 he had cumulatively worked moderately intensively on

12 13

14

H. L. Martensen, Af mit Levnet, Part 2 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1883), 5–6. See my article ‘How Kierkegaard became “Kierkegaard”: The Importance of the Year 1838’, Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 64/‘Søren Kierkegaard and Philosophy Today’ (2008): 741–61. Garff, Kierkegaard, 154.

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theology for about five years and that he had attained a level at least equivalent to what might today correspond to a good master’s degree, with a level of biblical scholarship far in excess of most present-day theological graduates, especially with regard to language competences. Graduation did not conclude Kierkegaard’s theological formation. Following a pilgrimage to his family roots in Saeding in Jutland (August 1840), he attended courses in homiletics and catechetics at the Pastoral Seminary to complete his qualification for ordination. These ran through till summer 1841 and involved preaching a practice sermon in Holmens Church in Copenhagen on 12 January 1841 (on the text Phil. 1.19-25).15 During 1840–1, Kierkegaard works on his master’s dissertation On the Concept of Irony, presented in the Philosophy Faculty, before going to Berlin (October 1841–March 1842). In Berlin he attended Schelling’s lectures on positive philosophy, billed as promising the overthrow of Hegelianism and the inauguration of a new era in philosophy. Kierkegaard’s letters suggest that it was chiefly to hear Schelling that he went to Berlin, although he, like many others, was quickly disappointed and he accused Schelling of ‘talking the most insufferable nonsense’16 – although his notes remain among the best sources for what Schelling actually said. At the same time, and although he jotted down a note that the Hegelian theologian Philipp Marheineke was guilty of ‘volatilizing’ Christian concepts, he also attended a number of Marheineke’s lectures on dogmatics, probably the last formal theology lectures he attended. To give a detailed summary of Kierkegaard’s theology studies would involve trawling through a great deal of fragmentary and not always illuminating material. Thus, it is not relevant to our present purposes to evaluate the philological quality of his New Testament Latin translations – although even here there are points of minor interest in relation to the later authorship, as when he translates agapē by amor rather than caritas, a choice that arguably stands in tension with the strong distinction made in Works of Love between preferential or erotic love and Christian other-regarding love. Rather than offer a blow-by-blow account, then, this chapter will be limited to highlighting and briefly examining some of the more significant elements in Kierkegaard’s theological education. These will be the notes on Schleiermacher, Clausen’s lectures on the history of doctrine, lecture and reading notes relating to the debate about speculative theology, notes on Romans and the notes on Marheineke.17 I shall not consider The Concept of Irony, since, although rich with theological implications, this was work of a more specifically philosophical character. The same applies to the notes on Schelling. For reasons of space I shall not discuss the material relating to his studies at the Pastoral Seminary, limiting myself to the University-based materials. Even with these limitations, however, this survey will confirm the preliminary view that by the time Kierkegaard began his pseudonymous authorship he had received a thorough grounding in a wide

15

16 17

On 24 February 1844, he would also give a so-called dimis sermon, examined by the theologians C. J. Scharling and J. H. Paulli (on one of whose own sermons he would later write a scathing note in the journal – SKS 24, NB 22:79, p. 144). On Kierkegaard’s homiletic preparation, see Chapter 8 by Aaron P. Edwards in the present volume. LD, 141. I have examined the notes on Schleiermacher and on the debates about speculative theology in considerable detail elsewhere and will here offer only a summary of the most important passages in which Kierkegaard offers his own opinion on the subject at issue. See George Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century: The Paradox and the ‘Point of Contact’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapters 1–3.

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range of theological competences and that when, in that authorship, he engages fundamental questions of theology he thoroughly understood what he was doing in terms of contemporary scholarly discourse – even if he was, in the end, only fourth out of sixty-three.

II. SCHLEIERMACHER In 1834, Kierkegaard took individual tuition with his later bête noire, Hans Lassen Martensen. The tutorials involved Martensen giving one-to-one lectures on selected passages from Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre (a text which, according to his memoirs, he had himself chosen), followed by discussion. Martensen found Kierkegaard to be gifted but also tending towards ‘hair-splitting games’.18 Kierkegaard’s notes suggest that they worked through the Introduction and First Part of the work, covering the nature of the church and of doctrine, the role of the redeemer, the concept of God, and the relationship between God and the world. The notes themselves mostly have the form of more or less verbatim citations from the set text and only occasionally indicate points that Kierkegaard found questionable. The first of these interjections concerns the nature of the church and while Kierkegaard’s doubts may seem hair-splitting they anticipate an important theme in the later authorship. Kierkegaard writes, If ethics is to establish the concept [of the church] a priori, I cannot see how it will be able to define the positions in which the individual forms are found in their historical emergence, for it could be the case that history didn’t correspond to our ideas. If it is to define it a posteriori, then in what way are its labours different from the philosophy of religion?19 Despite his stilted student prose, Kierkegaard seems here to be making the important point that if we define the nature of the church in an essentialist manner (‘The church is x’), then we have to find criteria for evaluating the ways in which the actual historical life of the church deviates from that definition, as when the historical church is not faithful under persecution or itself becomes a persecuting power. This might then lead us to ask such questions as: at what point does a church that deviates from the idea of the church cease to be a church? On the other hand, if we accept the historical life of the church as the starting point then it becomes hard to justify the outcome as a properly theological interpretation; a purely historical or empirical survey amounts to no more than what Kierkegaard here calls ‘philosophy of religion’. If we allow that the point relates not only to the life of the church as a community but also to the doctrine through which the church regulates that life, then we see Kierkegaard already broaching themes that will become salient in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, when he debates both Hegelian and Grundtvigian views of the historical character of the church, and that will find explosive expression in the final ‘Attack on Christendom’ in which he accuses the contemporary Danish Church of failing to measure up to the idea of ‘New Testament Christianity’ – indicating that he has, in the end, opted for what (in 1834) he is calling an ‘a priori’ definition of the church. A similar concern seems to be behind a comment on

18 19

Kirmmse, Kierkegaard truffet, 273. SKS 27, Papir 9:1, p. 40.

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Schleiermacher’s preoccupation with justifying the ‘scientific’ (wissenschaftlich) character of Christian theology – but, Kierkegaard notes, this ‘scientific’ character ‘must surely have to be permeated by the Christian spirit, for otherwise we might be starting to build with alien materials’.20 Again, the arguments of the Postscript seem not far off. Kierkegaard’s notes show that he worked through Schleiermacher’s account of faith as a feeling of absolute dependence. But whereas Schleiermacher sees this as disallowing any element of activity on the part of the dependent self (which is why it is absolute dependence), Kierkegaard suggests that such a state would not negate activity but should involve both activity and passivity. This relates to the possibility of prayer since if there is no activity on the part of the self in relation to God, ‘Wouldn’t prayer have to be regarded as a fiction?’21 Kierkegaard then immediately associates this with the issue of predestination, which he sees as incompatible with Schleiermacher’s own account of what the latter calls the ‘teleological’ character of Christian piety, that is, as presupposing a personal relation to the redeemer.22 These last comments chime with Martensen’s observation that Kierkegaard seemed especially interested in the topic of predestination. Evidence for Kierkegaard’s interest in this topic may also be gleaned from other notes dating from late 1834 and concurrent with the tutorial notes.23 These are somewhat inconclusive, although Papir 79 (1 December 1834) optimistically announces ‘the real solution’ of predestination. In any event, the question again anticipates a major theme of Kierkegaard’s later writings, which may be read as a sustained defence of the freedom of Christian life, a freedom that is not negated by divine foreknowledge but grounded in divine creation.24 Further notes relate to issues of revelation, Jesus Christ as redeemer, the nature of doctrine, heresy, creation and the devil, but these are little more than headings with occasional passages translated into Danish. Sections dealing with relations between Judaism, Christianity and Paganism as well as between Catholicism and Protestantism are skipped. There are further, very sketchy notes on Schleiermacher’s treatment of the divine attributes, where Kierkegaard registers dissatisfaction with Schleiermacher’s distinction between God’s mediate and immediate action on the world since, in the case of God (he argues), any medium that God might use would itself have been created by Himself. To suppose media of divine action that God has not created would therefore be to imperil divine freedom.25 In increasingly fragmentary notes, Kierkegaard skims Schleiermacher’s discussions of divine creativity and of God’s knowledge of what is only possible, which topics, he notes, are inevitably confused by applying our experience of human knowledge and creativity to God. Questions of God’s omniscience and omnipotence are also noted, and a key issue that Kierkegaard flags up is the need to preserve the integrity of the divine being and action. Again looking forward to themes of the later authorship, we see here an early adumbration of what would be an abiding concern with the proper otherness of God. The final almost unintelligible notes suggest Kierkegaard read on into Part Two and the discussion of grace, but how much or how carefully he read is unclear.

20 21 22 23 24

25

SKS 27, Papir 9:1, p. 40 SKS 27, Papir 9:6, pp. 41–2. SKS 27, Papir 9:7, p. 42. SKS 27, Papir 96:3, p. 118; 52:1, p. 94; 52:2, p. 95; 53:2, p. 95; 86, p. 111; 79, p. 108. Biographically oriented approaches could also seek to connect this interest to Kierkegaard’s sense of suffering under some kind of divine curse. SKS 27, Papir 13:10, p. 50.

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What is clear, though, is that the tutorials with Martensen provided the occasion for Kierkegaard to make a significant if not exhaustive study of key elements of one of the most important Protestant theologians of the modern era. As some of the points highlighted by Kierkegaard suggest, this reading either awakened or reinforced (it is impossible to say which) issues that would be taken up and in some cases be central to his later theological writing.

III. CLAUSEN’S LECTURES ON DOGMATICS H. N. Clausen (1793–1877) was a representative of an older form of Protestant rationalism, though also influenced by both Kant and Schleiermacher. Kierkegaard’s notes on Clausen’s 1834 lectures on dogmatics (the third set of Clausen’s lectures he had attended) are quite extensive and, as the editors of the new Danish edition of Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter suppose, are probably a fair copy incorporating material from notes taken by amanuenses. The final version may therefore have been produced for examination purposes at a later date but, in any case, what we have reflects the lectures as given in both winter and summer semesters 1833/4 although they neither begin at the beginning nor end at the end. The reasons for this can only be guessed at. The notes begin with the heading ‘Chapter 5. On the Relation of Holy Scripture to Reason’. Clausen’s own theological principles become clear in the opening statement that Christianity ‘presupposes an original religious consciousness and certain moral dispositions’ in those whom it will lead to God.26 The Schleiermacherian influence is apparent a few lines later when Clausen adds that religion is to be defined as ‘the immediate consciousness in which the hum[an] being feels conscious of being dependent on God, and of being taken up into and incorporated into the divine being’.27 Furthermore, Christianity presupposes that ‘its doctrine accords with the basic principles of hum[an] thought, and strengthens respect for and confidence in the spiritual powers in hum[an] beings’.28 As for Scripture, it requires ‘historical and critical investigation’, in the course of which the interpreter learns to distinguish between the true content of, for example, Jesus’s teaching and what is owing to its inevitable accommodation to the needs of those to whom it was delivered (such as belief in the devil). Kierkegaard comments that Clausen’s example of a positive accommodation, namely, the injunction to refrain from eating meat so as not to cause offence, is scarcely relevant to issues of doctrine. However, he notes the compatibility of revelation and reason without further comment. Clausen sees the need for dogmatics as deriving from the inherent impulse of human nature to communicate itself and the consequent need to make whatever is communicated coherent and comprehensible. Dogmatics nevertheless has a positive basis in Scripture and shows ‘the scientific definition of individual doctrines and their reciprocal connection in a coherent whole’.29 This brings it into the same sphere as philosophy of religion, although the latter has not such external positive source or criterion. Historically it also extends to both anticipations and developments of Christian teachings.

26 27 28 29

KJN 3, p. 5 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:2, p. 9. KJN 3, p. 5 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:2, p. 9. KJN 3, p. 5 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:2, p. 9. KJN 3, p. 11 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:3, p. 15.

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Clausen’s revisionist agenda becomes clear in his rejection of both angelology and demonology as integral to Christian teaching.30 Here, as will continue to be the case throughout the notes, Clausen’s case is supported by extensive specific references to Scripture and to the church’s symbolic books, often cited in Latin. The notes on ‘Christian anthropology’ identify the image of God in human beings as found ‘in the soul’s capacity for thought and self-determination’.31 Clausen affirms belief in some kind of bodily resurrection, involving both difference from and analogy to our present state. Supported (he believes) by the symbolic books, he absolves Christian teaching from having to give any specific views on, for example, intermediate states (such as purgatory) or on eternal damnation. He notes views, such as Marheineke’s, that question the total identity of the present and future body. Turning to ‘Human Sinfulness’, Clausen represents Scripture as teaching this to be ‘self-inflicted’, ‘common to all’ and ‘a weakness in spirit with regard to its striving toward God’.32 However, ‘The later doctrine of the Fall as the complete ruination of hum[an] nature as a result of Adam’s one sin, and the attribution of this sin to his descendants, is alien to scripture.’33 Sin is a ‘disturbance’ in human nature that makes ‘help from on high needful’ but it is not an alteration in human nature as such. The point of the doctrine is to promote humility and to awaken and strengthen the longing for God. Thus, versus both ‘Pelagian frivolity and Augustinian abasement’, the ‘best current in modern theology’ has worked ‘to unite the recognition of a common original sinfulness (frailty) with belief in moral freedom and its power when God’s grace is at work in the hum[an] Being’.34 Clausen next turns to soteriology, commencing with the person of Christ. Here he argues that the point of Christological doctrine is not to define the way in which Christ is joined to the Father but to express the practical recognition of ‘the connection between the div[inity] in Chr[ist]’s nature and the div[inity] in his activity’ – but this connection ‘is mysterious and inconceivable’, although allowing for some analogies with, for example, the relationship between the soul and body or the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer.35 The excessive ‘dogmatizing’ of Protestant scholasticism ‘retains at most a merely historical interest’.36 Against the background of Jewish messianic expectations (discussed at length), Jesus’s own understanding of Messiahship rejected ‘every idea of Jewish dominion and worldly power’. Instead, ‘the aim of his teaching, life, and death was the founding of a society in which [reconciliation and peace with God by means of faith; freedom from ignorance, sin, and death] was to be allotted to hum[an] Beings’.37 In this society the various powers of human beings will be brought into ‘harmonious activity’, underpinned by assurance of God’s grace.38 Christian teaching is efficacious in this regard by virtue of ‘the lofty purity, depth and clarity [of what it says] concerning God’s nature and being’ and the authority of Christ demonstrated in his ‘obedience, love, and self-sacrifice’.39 Although Clausen

30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

KJN 3, pp. 14–17 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:5, pp. 17–22. The creedal renunciation of the devil had been the focus of the debate between Clausen and Grundtvig in 1825. KJN 3, p. 18 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:6, p. 23. KJN 3, p. 28 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:6, p. 33. KJN 3, p. 29 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:6, p. 34. KJN 3, p. 31 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:6, p. 37. KJN 3, p. 37 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:7, p. 43. KJN 3, p. 38 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:7, p. 44. KJN 3, p. 45 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:7, p. 50. KJN 3, p. 46 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:7, p. 51. KJN 3, p. 48 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:7, p. 53.

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rejects the reduction of all biblical teaching about atonement to accommodation, he also rejects the ‘theological systematizing’ that distracts from the practical thrust of biblical teaching.40 Clausen consistently minimizes the distance between faith and works in evangelical teaching, arguing that the difference between Paul and James is based on a misunderstanding. Faith cannot be separated from repentance, inner transformation and sanctification. Indeed, he seems also to be saying that faith cannot really be distinguished from love: coming to faith is to manifest that ‘love has taken the place of fear’, enabling a person ‘to fulfill the div[ine] law’.41 The Reformers did a service in their rejection of Catholic misinterpretations, but their polemical approach also had negative consequences and obscured the ‘correct interpretation and application’ of the Reformation teaching, namely, ‘voluntary obedience to God’s law and diligence in good works’.42 All of this, we might think, is not without some subterranean link to Kierkegaard’s own later championing of James and his insistence on the need for works of love. Turning to grace and election, Clausen again warns against excessive zeal for knowledge, not least with regard to whether this election extends to all human beings. The Augustinian theory of the complete corruption of human nature is incompatible with both Scripture and the requirements of Christian life. Coupled with predestination this led Protestant theology into various ‘hair-splitting distinctions’43 and Clausen implies that Greeks were right never to abandon belief in ‘free cooperation with God’s grace’ and the limiting of predestination to foreknowledge.44 Summing up, Clausen, as recorded by Kierkegaard, concludes that ‘while the Tridentine Counc[il] remained at the halfway point betw[een] semi-Pel[agianism] and August[inianism], the Formula of Concord went deeper into a wilderness which it was unable to escape’.45 With regard to the church, Clausen insists that Christ’s work is not aimed solely at the individual but at the social reality of the human race and it is implicitly universalist in scope, combining unity and freedom. Of course, the historical church early opted for a coercive and authoritarian approach that undermined freedom and jeopardized ‘the exercise of spiritual influence’ as the sole means of attaining its goals.46 The section on the church concludes the main part of Kierkegaard’s notes. The next part, as the Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter editors note, has an uncertain relation to the other notes and may have been prepared at a later date (they surmise 1839–40, when Kierkegaard was preparing for his final examinations) before being pasted into Notebook 1. Most entries have the form of points or headings and include a list of divine attributes, with scriptural and Reformation references; a list of proofs for the existence of God (in Latin) with Patristic and medieval references, and topics relating to creation, providence and human beings’ original perfection, immortality, sinfulness and a brief paragraph on demonology. It is interesting with regard to Kierkegaard’s later work, especially The Concept of Anxiety, that he notes Clausen having differentiated between human beings’ ideal and primordial states, the latter being not essentially historical but, as Kierkegaard puts it (in vocabulary indicating this note to be subsequent to his acquaintance with

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

KJN 3, p. 52 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:7, p. 57. KJN 3, pp. 55–6 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:8, pp. 60–1. KJN 3, p. 59 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:8, pp. 63–4. KJN 3, p. 65 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:8, p. 69. KJN 3, p. 64 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:8, p. 69. KJN 3, p. 66 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:8, p. 70. KJN 3, p. 68 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:8, pp. 72–3.

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speculative theology), belongs to ‘pure Being’, that is, to ‘the system’ but does not exist ‘as such’.47 From early on in his university career, then, Kierkegaard was familiar with a broad spectrum of historical and systematic dogmatic topics; he has studied, or at least heard of, key Patristic, medieval and Reformation (and even Counter-Reformation) figures and approaches. Although Clausen represents the liberalism that Kierkegaard would in many ways reject, it is also striking that, in The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard too will undertake a rewriting of the Fall that is both conscious of the differing competencies and approaches of dogmatics and philosophy of religion and that also erases the supernatural elements of the narrative such as an audible divine commandment and the serpent-tempter, as well as reinterpreting demonic possession in terms of a lack of freedom. More positively, Kierkegaard’s insistence on freedom as a defining category of spiritual life seems, however differently explored, to echo elements of Clausen’s overall approach. Likewise we can see echoes in his later work of the practical character of Christian teaching, the need for works of love and a suspicion of overly systematic and theoretical approaches. But underlying differences are no less clear and if Clausen’s systematic revision of Christian doctrine was moderated by his practical orientation and his preference for mystery over explanation Kierkegaard would soon discover in speculative philosophy a more radical version of demythologized Christianity that made it clear to him where a line needed to be drawn. It is to the encounter with speculative theology, then, that we now turn.

IV. SPECULATIVE THEOLOGY I have examined Kierkegaard’s study of speculative theology at length elsewhere and will limit myself here to bringing out points that highlight some of the points at which he made his own comments on the relevant texts.48 In the autumn of 1837, Martensen offered the series of extracurricular lectures entitled ‘Introduction to Speculative Dogmatics’ that we have heard him describe as having a ‘great and exceptional’ effect on students. Kierkegaard attended at least ten of these and took fairly extensive notes. Continuing through much of 1838, he continued to read intensively in the field of speculative theology and philosophy and possibly attended lectures Martensen gave in the summer semester of 1838 on ‘Speculative Dogmatics’. Also that summer he studied some of the literature responding to D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined (published in 1835), although there is no record of his having read that work itself. This early study of speculative thought would be foundational for the later attacks on Hegelianism found in Concluding Unscientific Postscript and other works. Although Kierkegaard’s interest in speculative thought predates Martensen’s lectures (he had begun reading Bruno Bauer’s Journal for Speculative Theology in May–June 1837) and although his own view on their ‘success’ was doubtless rather different from the lecturer’s own self-congratulatory assessment, they remain an important milestone in the development of his attitude towards this new theological wave. The lectures began (on 15 November) with a discussion of the relationship between theology and philosophy. Since the medieval synthesis failed to meet biblical-ecclesiastical

47 48

KJN 3, p. 79 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:9, p. 81. See my Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chapters 2–3.

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needs, the demands of faith, and the critique of pure reason, a new approach is said to be needed and this is a theological phenomenology understood as ‘the development of theological knowing, insofar as its goal is self-consciousness’.49 But what does this mean? Basically, it means seeing how dogmatic ideas become manifest in a historical progression that develops according to its own inner logic. Catholicism and the Reformation are thus two poles of the dialectic that finds its culmination in the speculative self-consciousness that, Martensen says, is the ‘essential object’ of the lectures. Kant is a pivotal figure in this development but, according to Martensen, Kant’s God depends entirely on the subjective act of the believer. I merely imagine him thus because he must be thus in order to be the ideal that can fulfil the postulates of my ethical consciousness. The [Christian], on the other hand, is conscious of himself, [knowing] that when he names the triune God, it is not a name he has given him, but one that God has given himself. K[ant] therefore may well have freedom, but lacks grace.50 With these words Kierkegaard’s lecture notes end (on 23 December). If Hegel was the ‘man of the moment’, then, listeners would have had to wait for the new year to reach that moment. Although the lectures carried on through the remainder of the semester (which ended in March), Kierkegaard had either lost interest or ceased taking notes after Christmas. His attitude to the lectures is indicated when he interrupts his notes on the discussion of Kant’s categories with the comment that it is ‘an Ode by Marthensen, one of the worst he has delivered so far, a forced cleverness’.51 ‘The worst’ suggests that, at the very least, there had been much else that Kierkegaard had not really cared for.

V. JOHANN EDUARD ERDMANN’S VORLESUNGEN ÜBER GLAUBEN UND WISSEN Erdmann’s published lectures on faith and knowledge offer an approach in which a phenomenological analysis of the religious consciousness is supposed to demonstrate the rational validity of the content of faith as knowledge of the union of divine and human. Kierkegaard took extensive notes on this important work at the conclusion of which he states his objections to Erdmann’s approach. In these closing comments he remarks that Erdmann’s conclusion, which replaces the person (the ‘I’) with a subject-object conceived in terms of reason and thought, is unjustified. ‘It may well be true that reason is universal selfconsciousness; but one is not therefore justified in saying that the question as to what is universal in self-consciousness means the same as that by which the self-conscious human being is distinguished from all other creatures, for reason as such lies beyond human beings.’52 Erdmann’s argument involves a ‘subreption’, an illegitimate transfer of goods, since although the view that the content of human self-consciousness is identical with reason itself is a mere assumption it is made the basis of Erdmann’s entire argument, which hinges on the claim that the analysis of religious self-consciousness is enough to demonstrate the necessity of faith. Kierkegaard also complains that Erdmann neglects Christianity’s

49 50 51 52

KJN 3, p. 127 / SKS 19, Notebook 4:5, p. 128. Translations from these lecture notes have been adapted. KJN 3, p. 142 / SKS 19, Notebook 4:2, p. 143. KJN 3, p. 135 / SKS 19, Notebook 4:9, p. 136. KJN 3, p. 160 / SKS 19, Notebook 4:41, p. 163.

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historical aspect. ‘[A]t several points’, he says, the historical aspect of Erdmann’s argument ‘seems to me to be a caricature’. It is ‘an ordering of life’s accidental concretion that is as good as it can be but not of the Idea’s necessary incarnation’. There is ‘a yawning abyss between abstract deduction and historical actuality’, since the necessity of thought cannot explain historical actuality, that is, why God became man.53 It is not just that the accidents of empirical experience ‘retard’ deduction, since the ‘history’ in question is not just a succession of facts but the history of the church’s symbolic texts, that is, the self-understanding of Christian tradition. Erdmann, however, seems to put the subject’s own ‘self ’ and ‘interests’ above the tradition, even if only ‘latently’. But are we entitled to submit Christianity to ‘experimentation’, as if it were the object of scientific investigation?54 Although there may be a sense in which Christian experience seeks ‘strengthening’ in a further experience, this is not the same as the experimental testing of a hypothesis. Reason asks, does this experience confirm the universal laws of reason? Christian faith asks, does this confirm the faith we have received from the tradition?55 Kierkegaard accepts Kant’s view that the thing-in-itself is closed off to human consciousness, and he also accepts that ‘no knowing’ entails ‘no faith’, since we cannot then say what we believe in. But this does not limit post-Kantian supernaturalism to simple agnosticism, since, properly understood, supernaturalism speaks of ‘a total transformation of consciousness’; faith involves ‘a development absolutely from scratch’, since it is not a mere non-knowing but ‘a new consciousness’ that is not circumscribed by the limits of consciousness in general as known apart from faith – again, it seems, Erdmann has simply begged the question as to the limits of consciousness.56 In these closing comments, then, Kierkegaard anticipates several key points to which he will return, for example, in Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. But he is not yet finished with speculative theology. As we have seen, he also took or copied notes on Martensen’s summer semester lectures on ‘Speculative Dogmatics’. At first glance there might seem to be much here with which Kierkegaard could have agreed, such as Martensen’s insistence on the ‘absolute personality’ of God, ‘who in his absolute substantiality knows and wills himself and stands in a freely creative relation to the world as that which is really different from himself ’.57 Similarly, Martensen sees the biblical God as revealed ‘in accordance with his subjectivity, i.e., as God’58 or Christ not being ‘the product of the human race’.59 Likewise, that ‘only such a God can come into a religious relation to a personally existing human being’ might also have been congenial to Kierkegaard. However, he would clearly have dissented when Martensen added that knowledge of this relation is achievable ‘only . . . through an infinite mediation’ that is unfolded in the history of religions. Kierkegaard might also have agreed with Martensen’s assertion that ‘Chr[istian] speculation has also at all times acknowledged the saying: credam ut intelligam’,60 yet although he nowhere intrudes his own views into the lecture notes themselves we have seen enough

53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60

KJN 3, p. 161 / SKS 19, Notebook 4:41, p. 164. This is similar to the question of essentialist versus historical definitions of the church that Kierkegaard had raised in relation to Schleiermacher. KJN 3, p. 163 / SKS 19, Notebook 4:42, p. 166. KJN 3, p. 163 / SKS 19, Notebook 4:42, p. 166. KJN 3, p. 164 / SKS 19, Notebook 4:44, p. 167. KJN 2, p. 344 / SKS 18, KK:11, p. 377. KJN 2, p. 347 / SKS 18, KK:11, p. 380. KJN 2, p. 349 / SKS 18, KK:11, p. 383. KJN 2, p. 352 / SKS 18, KK:11, p. 386. Italics added. He explicitly affirms it in a note from November 1837 (DD 82).

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to know that, already in the summer of 1837, a year before Martensen’s lectures, he would have had grounds on which to challenge the possibility that what is believed can be exhaustively mediated by historical experience and retrievable in the form of knowledge, something which Martensen seems to be aiming at here. For both, faith is prior to knowledge, but each has a very different view as to the extent to which it can then be translated into knowledge. Throughout the summer of 1838 Kierkegaard is also reading widely in relation to speculative theology, with a particular (though not exclusive focus) on the issues thrown up by Strauss’s Life of Jesus, in particular to Julius Schaller’s book, Der historische Christus und die Philosophie. Kritik der Grundidee des Werks das Leben Jesu von Dr. D. F. Strauss, published earlier that year in Leipzig. Schaller was himself a member of the ‘speculative theology’ movement, but very much on its political and theological ‘right’. Consequently, he rejects Strauss’s view that speculative theology removes the need for faith in the historical incarnation of God in the single human being, Jesus of Nazareth. After summarizing Strauss’s general position Schaller argues that Strauss is in fact limited by his own philosophical presuppositions. Christian doctrine is itself a form of human self-consciousness and it is this, not supposed historical facts, that constitutes the real historical meaning of the gospels – but it is precisely this self-consciousness that constitutes the content of the myths that Strauss rejects. A key point is Strauss’s denial of the personal divine-humanity of the historical individual Christ. The participation of the individual in the species ‘has nothing personal about it’ and the individual person is by no means redeemed in such a union of divinity and humanity. Reconciliation with God, however, is a matter of the relation of the individual subject to God. Reconciliation more or less amounts to a new faith, a new way of knowing, a new knowledge of God. – The new relation to God, however, must essentially take its point of departure from the side of God, for without this it becomes an empty movement within subjectivity’s own limits, an appearance without essence, a mere opinion. – It is a property of the concept of truth, as such, that in relation to subjective knowledge it exists as a presupposition. For our knowledge truth is the absolute ‘prius’ which we do not invent but discover, which we bring to consciousness and by attentive reflection are to incorporate and reproduce. (The relation of error to truth). In the recognition of reconciliation is also found a deeper insight into sin.61 We might think that this would appeal to Kierkegaard, as would Schaller’s further point that the God-relationship is a relationship of two personal subjectivities. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard comments that Schaller’s work, like other examples of recent philosophy, addresses questions ‘that have never been voiced in the Christian consciousness’.62 While the priority of God is indeed the sine qua non of any actual relationship between God and human beings, the Christian consciousness assumes this as given and is solely interested in how ‘to grasp the concretions that this relationship has taken’. Schaller develops only the ‘possibility of God’s relation to human beings’, but since this says nothing about how the wrathful God is actually reconciled to the individual ‘this question has no real meaning for Christian consciousness, though it may very well be important for philosophical

61 62

KJN 2, p. 300 / SKS 18, KK:2, p. 328. KJN 2, p. 302 / SKS 18, KK:2, pp. 330–1.

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“Vorstudien” ’.63 The opposition between God and world that is assumed in Schaller’s model is ‘purely logical and . . . the opposition that comes under the rubric of religiousmoral views (sin, etc.) has not been touched upon, the reason for which is, naturally, that one hasn’t yet arrived at that point’.64 Kierkegaard does not comment on Schaller’s subsequent discussion of the historical and personal aspect of Christ and what he calls ‘the mythical volatilization of the historical Christ’ in Strauss nor on the discussion or the relationship between philosophy and faith. However, although Schaller’s work only amounts to Vorstudien, Kierkegaard shares at least one of its central insights: that the issue of faith is precisely an issue for the selfconsciousness of the believer and cannot be made dependent on external evidences (such as miracles), while, given the historical concreteness of human self-consciousness, faith will nevertheless be testified historically.

VI. ROMANS 9 The notes on Romans 9 in journal KK:7 are assigned by the Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter editors to the winter semester of 1839–40 and are connected by them to C. E. Scharling’s lectures on Romans during that semester. These notes cover material dealing with chapters 9–16, although from chapter 12 onwards they become very sketchy. Kierkegaard uses two popular study aids of the time, the commentary by F. A. G. Tholuck (which, as its title states, also includes running ‘excerpts from the exegetical writings of the Church Fathers and Reformers’65) and K. G. Bretschneider’s Greek-Latin lexicon of the New Testament – the latter a reminder that Latin was still a working language of theological study. Kierkegaard also uses a contemporary edition of the Hebrew Bible.66 The opening section on chapter 9 gives us a taste of the kind of approach being adopted. The notes start by commenting on the ‘anathema’ that Paul hypothetically wishes to become, if it would help his Jewish brothers to come to Christ (v. 3). The term is given in Greek and Hebrew and three types of ban identified in Rabbinic literature are listed, each being given in Hebrew. This leads into a theological discussion based on Paul’s typological use in the following verses of the patriarchal narrative to explain the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. With regard to both covenants the commentary leans towards what is called the ‘Calvinist’ view that election to both covenants is equally dependent on divine decree. Nevertheless, because Judaism involves an external covenant and Christianity an internal covenant, the former can allow for human works whereas the latter is based on an ‘objective offer of grace’ that ‘requires only receptivity on the part of hum[an] beings’.67 A marginal comment, copied in Latin from Tholuck, further emphasizes the priority of God in election. Kierkegaard also notes variant readings between the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint.

63 64 65 66

67

KJN 2, p. 302 / SKS 18, KK:2, p. 331. KJN 2, pp. 302–3 / SKS 18, KK:2, p. 331. KJN 2, pp. 610–11 / SKSK 18, pp. 361–2. Tholuck is categorized by Karl Barth as a ‘revivalist’ theologian, although he also accuses his theology of being ultimately about his own pious feelings. See Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, trans. J. Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1972), 508–18. On Bretschneider, see Lee C. Barrett, ‘Bretschneider: The Tangled Legacy of Rational Supernaturalism’, in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries: Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 6: tome II (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 39–52. KJN 2, p. 331 / SKS 18, KK:7, p. 362.

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Turning next to the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, the notes affirm the synod of Dordrecht’s reading that this gives ‘a living example of how a hum[an] being is able to accomplish absolutely nothing against God’.68 Yet God wants Pharaoh’s repentance and Origen is cited in support of the view that what the hardening reveals is actually the state of Pharaoh’s own heart. What we have here, it is suggested, is a kind of intensification, such that God’s ‘hatred’ for Esau is amplified or, more precisely, internalized in his ‘making stubborn’ Pharaoh’s heart. At the same time God’s capacity for mercy is also extended and internalized, from a purely external activity to something more inward. Kierkegaard’s marginal note explains what he thinks is going on: ‘What Paul is especially trying to do throughout this passage is to acquit God of the inopportune consequences of the gracious election whereby the Jews had become what they were, by showing that precisely because it is a gracious election they have no legitimate grounds for making any demands’.69 Moving forward to v. 22, Kierkegaard notes grammatical issues around the Greek katērtizmena, referring to vessels ‘prepared’ for destruction. The problem, again, is whether God is to be blamed for making certain persons, Pharaoh or the Jews, objects of retribution and whether they have any choice in the matter. Kierkegaard notes the interpretative strategy of reading the term as middle-voiced, thus implying no direct agency on God’s part. God is ultimately responsible, but not in such a way as to cancel human agency. Through the commentary on the following verses, partly in Danish, partly in Latin, Kierkegaard, helped by Tholuck, notes further examples of Israel’s disobedience being met both by God’s judgement and by his mercy. The notes continue along these lines and, as stated, are fairly thorough through to the end of chapter 11, that is, through to the end of the discussion of the Jews. This particular section of Romans was not prescribed for the examination, so do these notes suggest that Kierkegaard had a particular interest in the destiny of the Jews? The question is sharpened by the charge of Anti-Semitism made in an extensively researched study by Peter Tudvad.70 Yet we have seen that Kierkegaard passed over the passages in Schleiermacher dealing with Judaism. More than an interest in Judaism, what the notes most suggest is, again, his strong interest in the question of divine foreknowledge and predestination and how, if God is indeed sovereign in all things, humans are accountable for their obedience or resistance, whether they are Pharaohs, Jews or Christians. The notes also illustrate that if Kierkegaard perceived Judaism as a religion focused on purely external observance and earthly rewards, he was on this point entirely in line with contemporary biblical theology.

VII. MARHEINEKE Kierkegaard arrived in Berlin on 25 October 1841, a week after Hegel’s successor, Philipp Marheineke, had begun lecturing on ‘The History of Christian Dogma’ and his notes correspond closely to what Marheineke would publish as the ‘System of Christian Dogmatics’ (1847).71 Although a separate entry refers to Marheineke’s approach as ‘the philosophical

68 69 70 71

KJN 2, p. 332 / SKS 18, KK:7, p. 363. KJN 2, p. 333 / SKS 18, KK:7, p. 364. See Peter Tudvad, Stadier på Antisemitismens Vej (Copenhagen: Rosinante, 2010). On Marheineke, see Heiko Schulz, ‘Marheineke: The Volatilization of Christian Doctrine’, in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries: Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 6: tome II (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 117–42.

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evaporation of the Chr[istian] concept of doctrine’,72 Kierkegaard took extensive notes in an often garbled mixture of German and Danish that nevertheless show a clear grasp of the overall development of the argument. It is perhaps puzzling that he went to so much trouble, given that he had already formulated a distinctive critical view of speculative theology three years earlier. Given the extent – and complexity – of the notes, it is again not possible to go through them all, and in what follows I shall pick out a few main headings that are of particular interest for Kierkegaard’s later development: the doctrines of creation and Fall, and Christology and atonement. In an opening section that refers to Jacob Boehme and to Spinoza, Marheineke starts with an account of how the simple idea of God yields the twofold being of Father and Son. God’s being is not in ‘thought, being alone’ but in thought and being that is manifest to and known to itself. This is seen by Marheineke as reflected in the two aspects of logos, as ground and as reason, and is the basis both for God’s being God and for God becoming manifest; it (logos) is therefore also that through which God is knowable: ‘Only in the Son can one come to the Father’ because it is only in the Son that the being of the Father is manifest.73 Without the notes clarifying the connection between them, Marheineke moves next to ‘God’s mediated revelation’: whereas the co-eternity of the Son is God’s revelation to and through himself, ‘mediated revelation’ is revelation through what is not God, that is, in the first instance, creation. Here Marheineke adopts a presentational approach that he will maintain throughout the lectures, beginning by summarizing, first, the biblical teaching, second, the church’s teaching, and then ‘the concept’ of the dogma in question. According to a familiar Hegelian pattern this implies that a properly speculative approach, while not in opposition to biblical or ecclesiastical teaching, is now able to articulate that teaching in a fuller and more truthful way than either the Bible or the dogmatic tradition ever did. As the initial comments about being, thought and the relationship of Father and Son imply, Marheineke’s interest is in the kind of consciousness that is best able to grasp the conceptual truth of the doctrine at issue – although it is striking that his approach seems more emphatically theocentric than either Erdmann or Martensen. The insistence on creatio ex nihilo means that God cannot be known through the accumulation or organization of sense-perception, which is always tied to the particular entity – ‘The Spirit does not hover over the waters but the waters retain the upper hand’, as Marheineke nicely puts it.74 To know God as creator, one must rise from empirical knowledge to spiritual knowledge: ‘Nature’s truth is found in Spirit’, but Spirit is precisely and solely knowable through self-consciousness.75 However, since God can have no other goal in creating higher than himself, he is himself the infinite goal or purpose of the world: the world does not have its purpose in itself but only in and through its relation to God and this is only possible where there is self-consciousness. Thus ‘Div[ine] love and holiness are realized in hum[an] reason and freedom . . . When the world’s Zweck [goal] is attained it is thus the glorification of God’.76 In other words, when human beings freely and self-consciously

72 73 74 75 76

KJN 3, p. 239 / SKS 19, Notebook 8:52, p. 246. KJN 3, p. 244 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 250. KJN 3, p. 245 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 250. KJN 3, p. 245 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 251. KJN 3, p. 248 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 253.

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come to know the divine purpose in creation, this is itself the fulfilment of that purpose since it means that God is known and glorified as God. This then leads Marheineke directly to the doctrine of the human being as made in the image of God, which, as he puts it, establishes the human being ‘As the midpoint of creation as a necess[ity] of the dialectical movement thereto’, which he further glosses with the comment that ‘What is great in what God brings forth is not its extent, as if God’s image in the world was developed successively on different planets, but in the intensity that is Spirit.’77 However, whereas the Son’s relation to the Father is immediate, a relationship of identity – ‘homoousios and not merely homoiousios’ – the likeness, Ebenbild, in human beings involves difference – a difference that is then cancelled in and by ‘the second Adam’.78 What does this difference entail? In that the divine image has to do with reason and freedom and thus ‘the mind’, it means that the human being is a being of possibility – but this, though in and of itself innocent, also implies the possibility of becoming guilty. At the same time, even subsequent to the Fall we have a memory of this original innocence, which, says Marheineke, ‘is what lies in the teaching that God’s image is lost and yet present’.79 Strikingly, Marheineke here takes the view that Kierkegaard will later put forward in The Concept of Anxiety that the first Adam was not a being endowed with all perfections but an essentially innocent being, a being of possibility.80 With regard to the origin of evil and its universality, Marheineke briefly glosses biblical, Augustinian and more recent supernaturalist views, before developing his own conceptual account. As a being of nature, human consciousness has the possibility of identifying itself with its natural condition, for example, its bodily desires, in such a way as to become ‘selbst-süchtige Natur’ (self-desiring nature), that is, egotistical, and thus to lose the divine image.81 Everything thus becomes a drama of consciousness. Evil is not an entity in itself, nor is the devil ‘out there’. Rather, the manifestation of evil is what happens when ‘the hum[an] being makes the subjective thought of evil objective for himself and thereby allows it to have power over him’.82 Likewise, evil is not anything actual, ‘it is an sich das Nichtige, das Negative des Wirklichen [it is in itself the nothing, the negative of the actual]’ and as such ‘exists’ only ‘in becoming’, that is, in changing everything ‘actually essential, to something temporal and spatial and thereby makes it something un-being, inessential’.83 But if evil cannot therefore be considered a ‘real’ element in human nature, nor can it be said that the human being is naturally good. Why not? Because ‘nature’ itself is neither good nor bad: good and evil only come into existence through Spirit, through what intrinsically transcends merely natural being. What we see in the Fall, then, is the human being turning away from its aspiration towards the Spirit-world and turning instead, deliberately and willingly, to the world of sensuous experience. That this temptation occurs through speech (i.e. the serpent) is necessary because only in speech, only in an organ that corresponds to human beings’ 77 78 79 80

81 82 83

KJN 3, p. 248 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 254. KJN 3, p. 249 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 254. KJN 3, p. 250 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 255. Of course, Kierkegaard also had other sources for this view, such as Karl Rosenkranz, another speculative theologian, whom he explicitly cites. KJN 3, p. 252 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 257. KJN 3, p. 252 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 257. KJN 3, p. 253 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 258.

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essentially spiritual identity, can the desire itself be spiritually significant (as opposed to a simple desire to satisfy a bodily need). ‘This subordination of reason and freedom to desire and Wahrnehmung [perception] is the Fall; the consciousness of this is guilt. Thus he is not sinful because he is a sensuous being or lives in a sensuous world’.84 The metaphysical possibility of sin is therefore inherent in the constitution of human existence and, in this sense, the doctrine of original sin is correct in affirming that ‘Everyone is born a sinner’ and even good people testify that ‘deep in the heart there is concealed an inclination to sin’.85 But, for the same reason, we should not identify this general condition of sinfulness with the consequences of a particular sin perpetrated by a particular individual: Adam. Adam’s sin is essentially the same as every other sin and vice versa. As Kierkegaard will also do, Marheineke therefore attacks views that separate Adam and Adam’s sin from our sin: ‘as he fell, so each still falls. Kant already said: mutato nomine de te narratur fabula [with a change of name, the story concerns you]. If this becomes the substantial content of the narrative, then it is all the same whether it is regarded as a poem, a myth, philosophy, or history. Its truth is confirmed in everyone’s consciousness’.86 This teaching Marheineke finds confirmed in both Paul and Augustine. After sections on the preservation of the world and providence, Marheineke turns to Christology, starting with the unity of the divine and human natures. Citing Martin Chemnitz, Marheineke emphasizes that this unity is not so much to be thought of as a given state, unio, but an active unification, unitio, a communicatio idiomatum (communication of idioms). However, recent dogmatic thinking confuses the issue. Rationalism makes Christ into no more than a practical ideal and Schleiermacherian theology reduces him to an aesthetic ideal, ‘a beautiful image’.87 In philosophy, Kant’s Christology leaves us with a gap between the divine ideal and the reality of the world, while Schelling’s Christ is the symbol of an idea, lacking historical concreteness. Marheineke’s solution is therefore to draw on his opening section on the nature of revelation as rooted in the twofold being of God. The revelation of God, in Christ, in the world is a revelation of God ineluctably marked by the difference between God and world. Nevertheless, what this revelation reveals is a God revealed fully and immediately to himself in the relationship of Father and Son. However, to see how such revelation happens, Marheineke turns again to the question of human nature. As an animal being, human being is nevertheless from the outset different from mere animal being by virtue of thought. In the beginning, thought is directed outwards to the world, but when it becomes self-conscious it becomes aware of itself as a free personality. Initially this consciousness seems to come from outside, from God, who alone is ‘the absolute identity of freedom and reason’.88 The mystery of human Spirit is hidden in God, but mediation, that is, religion, ‘removes the hiddenness and makes manifest the one in the other’.89 In other words, the revelation of the mystery of personality in human beings is the revelation of their spiritual kinship with God. As Marheineke puts it, ‘That hum[an] beings’ self-relation becomes their God-relation is div[ine] upbringing.’90

84 85 86 87 88 89 90

KJN 3, p. 254 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 259. KJN 3, p. 255 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 260. KJN 3, p. 255 /SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 260. Italics added. KJN 3, p. 261 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 265. KJN 3, p. 263 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 267. KJN 3, p. 264 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 268. KJN 3, p. 265 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 269.

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Reflecting on how the manifestation of perfect personality in Christ relates to imperfect, striving human beings, Marheineke pauses to take issue with D. F. Strauss. Strauss had proposed understanding the doctrine of the incarnation as revealing the divinity of humanity as a whole, a divinity to be realized in the infinite expansion and improvement of human society through the application of science. Marheineke agrees with Strauss that the incarnation is not to be regarded ‘ex abrupto’, as a sudden irruption of an alien divinity into the course of the world. Nevertheless, he argues that the mystery of personality is precisely the mystery of the infinite in the individual. Indeed, ‘only the Einzelne [individual] is truly infinite’ and ‘[Christ] came as the individual, this very individual’.91 Yet, uniquely, his individuality is not limited by family or nationality, thus he can be Christ for all humanity – though, crucially (versus Strauss) not identical with the totality of humanity. Marheineke continues with an account of atonement, the doctrines of the Spirit and the Trinity, and the doctrine of grace (election, predestination, conversion, illumination, sanctification). Here, as a Reformed theologian, he insists on the priority of grace, but he also resists any expansion of the idea of predestination over and above what is required by the notion of divine foreknowledge. Speaking of ‘the election of grace’ he says that ‘the truth of this election consists in all being chosen’, and the way in which this choice becomes manifest is calling, ‘the beginning of all the works of grace’.92 ‘For a hum[an] being to convert to God without God is a contradiction. But God will by no means convert anyone against his will’.93 In the penultimate section on which Kierkegaard took notes, ‘Sanctification’, Marheineke insists that this is ‘just as much a div[ine] as a hum[an] act’, noting that ‘Modern theology has gone astray on this point, especially since Kant’. Sanctification is, and the implication is must be, ‘manifest in the lives of individuals’.94 It is hard to draw any overall conclusions from these notes. As we have seen, Kierkegaard regarded Marheineke’s position as the ‘volatilization’ of Christian doctrine and came to the lectures of this most eminent of speculative theologians with a quite fully developed set of critical objections. Yet, at the same time, apart from renewing, deepening and extending his knowledge of speculative theology across a range of key dogmatic points, they (a) show the continuing importance he attached to reckoning with theology of this kind and (b) also, however passingly, illustrate points of convergence, as in the character of original sin and the nature of its universality. At the same time, irrespective of what Kierkegaard took from these lectures and, indeed, of Barth’s judgement on this ‘tragic’ phase of theological development, we must also acknowledge that Marheineke intends to use the formal structure of speculative thought to preserve and to give an account of the full curriculum of Christian doctrine.95 It is not, as in the case of Strauss, a straightforward case of demythologizing. Nevertheless, and despite Marheineke’s own attempts to articulate the primacy of God in creation, revelation, incarnation and the election of grace, these lectures would surely have confirmed Kierkegaard’s suspicion that speculative theology was essentially limited to an interpretation of human religious

91 92 93 94 95

KJN 3, p. 267 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, p. 271. KJN 3, p. 296 / SKS 19, Notebook 10:9, p. 298. KJN 3, p. 297 / SKS 19, Notebook 10:9, p. 299. KJN 3, p. 298 / SKS 19, Notebook 10:9, p. 300. Barth describes Marheineke as ‘tragic’ on the grounds that his genuine theological intentions were catastrophically distorted by his embrace of Hegelian philosophy. See Barth, Protestant Theology, 491–8.

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consciousness rather than responding to an actual and concrete revelation. This was perhaps the revelation that he had hoped Schelling would speak about in lectures that he attended concurrently with those of Marheineke, but which, as we know, proved such a disappointment. That Kierkegaard’s career as a theological student thus ends in a double disappointment (in speculative theology and in the so-called ‘positive philosophy’ with which Schelling proposed replacing it) is, however, not a negative result. Had he found what he was looking for, whether in Copenhagen or Berlin, he would presumably have had so much the less motivation to develop his own original and transformative approach to Christian doctrine.

FURTHER READING Marheineke, P. Christlichen Dogmengeschichte, edited by S. Matthies and W. Vatke, Theologische Vorlesungen, vol. 4. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1849. Martensen, H. L. Christian Dogmatics. A Compendium of the Doctrines of Christianity, translated from the German by W. Urwick. London: T&T Clark, 1898. Pattison, George. Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century: The Paradox and the ‘Point of Contact’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Stewart, Jon, ed. Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries: Tome II: Theology. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 6: tome II. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Stewart, Jon, ed. Kierkegaard and His Danish Contemporaries: Tome II: Theology. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 7: tome II. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Kierkegaard the Reader of Scripture JOEL D. S. RASMUSSEN

INTRODUCTION It seems fair to say that despite the depth, breadth, insight and verve of Søren Kierkegaard’s biblical imagination, his reputation as an interpreter of Scripture remains obscured by his renown as a writer of literary, philosophical, theological and, not least, edifying works. Ironically, most of these literary, philosophical, theological and edifying works can justly be read as exercises in biblical interpretation. As a rule, Kierkegaard’s signed writings (both the explicitly Christian variety and the edifying discourses generally) read as meditations on various biblical passages and themes. So too, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship unfolds the world of the biblical in a variety of imaginative ways: Fear and Trembling explores the relationship between faith and understanding through an engagement with the narrative of Abraham’s binding of Isaac; Repetition contains a refracted reflection on Job’s ordeal; The Concept of Anxiety is a study of the Genesis story of Adam and the Christian notion of sin; Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript both focus on the New Testament doctrine of the incarnation; The Sickness unto Death and Practice in Christianity seek to develop a conception of selfhood appropriate to a life lived in the light of the Gospel, and so on with the later signed works, among which we find in For Self-Examination a programmatic statement of how Kierkegaard thinks one should read the Bible if it is to become for the reader ‘God’s Word’. Even Either/Or (although less concerned with biblical interpretation) concludes with a sermon on Lk. 19.41-48, and in Stages on Life’s Way Kierkegaard has the pseudonym Frater Taciturnus write, ‘The Bible lies on my table at all times and is the book in which I read the most.’1 One can well imagine Kierkegaard could have said the same thing in his own voice. Despite his biblical repertoire, however, Kierkegaard is not widely regarded as an important biblical interpreter, at least not among most biblical scholars. Whereas critical studies of nineteenth-century Scandinavian literature, of post-Kantian continental philosophy, and of modern Protestant theology regularly include considerations of Kierkegaard’s works and influence, when one turns to intellectual-historical studies of the development of modern biblical interpretation, such works generally pass over Kierkegaard in silence. And, when one does occasionally encounter cursory comment, such remarks are rarely commendatory. As John Barton remarks in The Nature of Biblical 1

SLW, 230 / SKS 6, 214.

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Criticism, for example, ‘within Protestant circles Kierkegaard’s ghost still lingers, calling in question the very possibility of a truly critical approach to the Bible on the part of a true believer’.2 From this perspective, Kierkegaard’s approach to the Bible has little to recommend it to a modern critical readership.3 Granted, Kierkegaard’s approach to reading the Bible is what he would have called ‘unscientific’, but this was meant to be a corrective to the ‘scientific’ scholarship of his day, and is hardly a feature derided in the post-foundational scholarship of our own age. Barton, for his part, argues persuasively that biblical criticism should be conceived primarily as a literary operation and, when also historical, should avoid the positivist tendencies of some proponents of old-school ‘historical-criticism’. Nonetheless, even biblical scholars sympathetic to Kierkegaard’s manner of reading the Bible recognize him as something of a misfit among the great nineteenth-century biblical interpreters. Richard Bauckham, for example, whose commentary on the Epistle of James is, so far as I can tell, unique among biblical commentaries for the way it brings Kierkegaard into the critical conversation, nevertheless agrees that Kierkegaard ‘is not an exegete, at least in the modern sense’.4 On this view, Kierkegaard can be regarded as a powerful interpreter of the Bible, although not one who reads the Bible in line with the standards of modern scholarship. And yet, in recent decades, the very understanding of what it means to be a biblical exegete or critic ‘in the modern sense’ has itself come under considerable scrutiny by proponents of so-called ‘post-liberalism’, especially in connection either with the more ‘positivist’ tendency sometimes to equate the disciple with a single-minded application of historical-critical methods on the one hand, or with the more ‘hermeneutical’ tendency to conceive the discipline in terms of the articulation of general structures of the human understanding, on the other. While Kierkegaard might well have satirized certain post-liberal tendencies towards scholasticism and party identity, and although he enjoyed a poetic freedom with the biblical text not characteristic of post-liberalism, it is nonetheless arguable that in his approach to the Bible he adumbrates a position in many ways consonant with the post-liberal critiques of modern biblical criticism; he calls into question the value (‘for faith’) of historical-critical scholarship, and he denies that the meaning of the Bible (when read as ‘God’s Word’) is to disclose any universal features of the human understanding. Given this, it seems remarkable that Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics – a landmark text in post-liberal theology and, indeed, one of the great studies of modern biblical hermeneutics generally – nowhere in its compass of almost 350 pages mentions

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John Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 141. This claim requires some qualification. Alongside a number of Kierkegaard-specific articles, the last quarter century has seen the appearance of several works on Kierkegaard’s reading and use of the Bible, and these have been a boon to Kierkegaard’s readership. See L. Joseph Rosas III, Scripture in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1994); Timothy Houston Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997); Jolita Pons, Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart, eds, Kierkegaard and the Bible, Tome I: The Old Testament; Tome II: The New Testament. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 1 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Hugh S. Pyper, The Joy of Kierkegaard: Essays on Kierkegaard as a Biblical Reader (London: Routledge, 2011); Stephen Westerholm and Martin Westerholm, Reading Sacred Scripture: Voices from the History of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2016), 327–55. My point, however, is that despite such recognition of Kierkegaard as a biblical thinker, more general works treating the reading and use of the Bible in modernity typically pass over Kierkegaard in silence, or at best mention him only in passing. Richard Bauckham, James: Wisdom of James, Disciple of Jesus the Sage (London: Routledge, 1999), 161.

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Kierkegaard.5 Granted, in terms of the history of reception, Kierkegaard might be said to belong more to the twentieth century than to the nineteenth, and more to theology and philosophy than to biblical hermeneutics. But it is difficult to account for the omission of Kierkegaard in connection with a study of figures such as Gotthold Lessing, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, G. W. F. Hegel, Ferdinand Christian Baur, Bruno Bauer, David Friedrich Strauss and others, along with an occasional nod to twentieth-century figures such as Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth (both of whom acknowledged the influence of Kierkegaard on their biblical interpretation). Now, given that Frei acknowledges Barth’s theology as one of the key influences to the development of his own thinking on hermeneutics, the fact that Kierkegaard plays no explicit role in his study of the biblical hermeneutics of the period – is not even cast as the voice of one crying in the wilderness – would itself seem to warrant the characterization of an ‘eclipse’. Or, to revert back to Barton’s metaphor, one might have thought that in such an intellectual-historical study ‘Kierkegaard’s ghost’ would have haunted the pages somewhat more prominently. The issue here goes deeper than historiographical questions of adequate ‘coverage’, however. for one feature of this chapter is to show how in his Christian hermeneutics of the imitation of Christ, Kierkegaard advocates a form of ‘realistic’ reading that is exemplary of the type of hermeneutics Frei shows to have been eclipsed by the main figures in modern biblical criticism. In this respect, what I want to demonstrate has something in common with one of the few monographs on Kierkegaard’s biblical hermeneutics. Timothy Houston Polk’s The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith (1997) is a tour de force in post-liberal narrative interpretation of Kierkegaard’s biblical hermeneutics. I think Kierkegaard could well agree with Polk’s assertion (the seminal statement of which in contemporary hermeneutics he attributes to Hans Frei) that the authentic Christian hermeneutics is one in which ‘scripture defines the world, not the other way around’.6 And I think Polk offers an insightful set of close readings focused on oftneglected texts from Kierkegaard’s ‘second literature’. I am unable, however, to follow Polk into the theory-laden anachronism of enrolling Kierkegaard as a ‘canon-contextual’ reader of the Bible for whom the church’s role is that of ‘interpretive community’. While it is surely right that all interpretations imply some interpretative community, it nonetheless seems problematic to enlist as a proponent of a canon-contextual ecclesiology the very writer whose ideal Christian pseudonym (Anti-Climacus) declares, in connection with the idea of church, that ‘ “fellowship” is a lower category than “the single individual” ’,7 and who under his own name writes, ‘the person who is not alone with God’s Word is not reading God’s Word’.8 In connection with this, I think it is important to address more fully than Polk does the centrality of Kierkegaard’s insistence on the individual ‘imitation of Christ’, even if we find this individualism problematic. Granted, Polk does acknowledge Kierkegaard’s emphasis on being conformed to Christ, but his attempt

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I should say here that (on a much smaller scale) this chapter has a key feature in common with Frei’s work, in that his opening line could easily serve as mine too: ‘This essay falls into the almost legendary category of analysis of analyses of the Bible in which not a single text is examined, not a single exegesis undertaken’ (Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974], vii). My aim in this chapter is to analyse some of the hermeneutical assumptions and practices Kierkegaard brings to his reading of the Bible; I leave specific questions of exegesis to specialists in the discipline of biblical criticism. Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard, 79. PC, 223 / SKS 12, 237. FSE, 30 / SKS 13, 58.

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to excavate the sociality of Kierkegaard’s views leads Polk to obscure Kierkegaard’s own fixation on individual imitation. Interestingly enough, it is precisely on this theme of imitation that I also disagree with the author of another monograph devoted to Kierkegaard’s hermeneutics. Jolita Pons’s 2004 Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible is an astoundingly erudite study of Kierkegaard’s general hermeneutics (especially in connection with such major twentieth-century practitioners as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur), along with an examination of Kierkegaard’s use of biblical quotations in his pseudonymous works. I am thoroughly persuaded by her claim that the Bible’s ‘presence’ in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings ‘could be called a kind of invisible omnipresence’.9 And the suggestion that the paradox of the incarnation ‘provides a horizon for the hermeneutical study of biblical quotations in Kierkegaard’s works’ is a point I will echo below.10 But with regard to what I take to be a criterion of Kierkegaard’s hermeneutics of imitation – namely, the interpretation of the Bible qua God’s Word as a pattern for an individual’s actual existence – it seems to me that Pons breaks off shy of the mark. True, she acknowledges that Christian imitation ‘begins for Kierkegaard with imitation of the Word’,11 but she later glosses this quite textually to mean Kierkegaard’s ‘imitation of the Bible’ in his writing strategies.12 The plausibility of this literary conception of Kierkegaard’s ‘imitation of the Bible’ derives from the way Kierkegaard configures and reconfigures the Bible ‘in a kind of spiral movement of imitation through deviations and reduplications without authority’.13 And I agree with Pons that Kierkegaard’s own imitation of Christ can be said to begin in his non-identical reduplication of the Bible in his prayerful literary productivity. I nonetheless think she pulls up short, however, by ignoring the fact that such discipleship has as its criterion the love of the neighbour one meets when one walks away from pen and paper and encounters another individual in the flesh: ‘when you open the door that you shut in order to pray to God and go out the very first person you meet is the neighbor, whom you shall love’.14 The reason I make this point here is because I am persuaded that Kierkegaard’s biblical hermeneutics entails more than the indefinite play of the text; the conception of discipleship he develops out of the Bible aims to move beyond textuality – from literary imitation to existential imitation. In view of this, the problem for biblical hermeneutics is that one comes to such a conception of Christ and of discipleship through an encounter with the biblical text, and yet the standard processes of interpretation – at least merely intellectual interpretation – ‘cannot fasten down anything’, as Kierkegaard says.15 Indeed, in a way that anticipates (and challenges) post-structuralist metaphors of textiles, textuality and differance, Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus alleges that merely intellectual interpretations ‘sew without fastening the end and without knotting the thread, and this is why, wonder of wonders, it can go on sewing and sewing, that is, pulling the thread through. Christianity, on the other hand, fastens the end by means of the paradox’.16 Corresponding to this view that the paradox of the God-man is the truth 9 10 11 12 13 14

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Pons, Stealing a Gift, xv. Ibid., 131. Ibid., xii. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 135. WL, 51 / SKS 9, 58. Kierkegaard’s discussion turns on Mt. 22.39. The synoptic parallels are Mk 12.31 and Lk. 10.27. Each individual coram Deo has the responsibility to love the neighbour, as Kierkegaard explicates the love commandment, although he never equates this mutuality with ‘fellowship’. JFY, 196 / SKS 16, 242. SUD, 93 / SKS 11, 206.

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announced by New Testament Christianity, Kierkegaard completes the image by insisting that the only way to come into a right relationship with the paradox is to seek (in faith) to conform one’s own actual life to his – ‘only imitation can tie the knot at the end’.17 What, then, should we make of the fact that on one hand Kierkegaard does, as Pons and Polk both rightly say, freely turn and turn the biblical text, ‘kaleidoscopically’ refracting its imbricated themes and figures in his authorship, yet on the other hand he insists, ‘God’s Word is given in order that you shall act according to it, not that you shall practice interpreting obscure passages’?18 Here I want to capitalize on Kierkegaard’s willingness to make ‘a distinction between reading and reading’19 in order to venture the proposal that within Kierkegaard’s authorship he actually operates multiple interrelated biblical hermeneutics. I already claimed above that Kierkegaard advocates a ‘realistic’ biblical hermeneutics that fosters the existential imitation of Christ in a reader’s actual existence. But this hermeneutics of imitation is contextualized both by what I want to call a hermeneutics of imaginative freedom and a hermeneutics of paradoxical fixation. These hermeneutics are configured dialectically, I argue, such that the interpretative freedom Kierkegaard exhibits in reconfiguring biblical texts in the aesthetic works is preserved even when he fixes his attention specifically in terms of the intellectual interpretability of ‘the absolute paradox’ in the Johannes Climacus works. Finally, both the imaginative freedom of the first hermeneutics and the paradoxical fixation of the second hermeneutics are preserved when he latterly comes to articulate the hermeneutics of the existential imitation of Christ that seeks to make real in the life of the follower the life of Christ as attested in the New Testament. This configuration is not without its complications! Kierkegaard requires much of his readers, and even if one is able to maintain a kind of interpretative equilibrium as one reads across his authorship in this way, it is not always obvious what weight to give the different features in view of his gift for irony. Moreover, as I mentioned above, Kierkegaard viewed his ‘unscientific’ approach to the Bible as a ‘corrective’ to the ostensibly ‘scientific’ excesses of modern biblical criticism, and so we should maintain a lookout for places where his penchant for polemic overcorrects his judgement that ‘the great mass of interpreters damage the understanding of the New Testament more than they benefit an understanding of it’.20 Nonetheless, in what follows, I think I am able to sketch the broad outlines of this threefold hermeneutics of imaginative freedom, paradoxical fixation and Christian imitation in such a way that shows how Kierkegaard seeks to enter into the world of the Bible through ‘a passage which is not yet blocked’.21

I. KIERKEGAARD’S HERMENEUTIC CONTEXT Coming to an understanding of Kierkegaard’s biblical hermeneutics entails understanding much that is not immediately obvious in his own writings. We need to know something about the background and context as well. This relationship between text and context is itself a central feature of the so-called hermeneutical circle, and one clearly adumbrated by the ‘father of biblical criticism’, Desiderius Erasmus (1466?–1536). Recognized as a key

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figure in the emergence both of Reformation Protestantism and Renaissance Humanism, Erasmus was a pioneer in the attempt to restore access to the original meaning of Scripture, and was among the first to insist upon the importance of recognizing how meaning is always embedded in a specific context. Thus, with respect to the biblical text, Erasmus writes, ‘it happens that not a little light is thrown on the understanding to the sense of Scripture if we weigh up not only what is said, but also by whom it is said, to whom it is said, in what words it is said, at what time, and on what occasion; what precedes, and what follows’.22 Erasmus devoted his considerable philological expertise in Greek, Latin and Hebrew to preparing critical editions and reliable translations of Scripture and of the early church fathers. Motivated by a rather deep aversion to Scholasticism, he sought to ‘return Christian thinking to its scriptural, evangelical roots’.23 And, in order to perceive the true ‘spiritual’ meaning beyond the ‘letter’ of the text, Erasmus believed one needed to read it in its original so as to achieve an ‘undistorted contact’ with the message of the Gospel.24 This concern for the recovery of original sources was to prove decisive for a number of Erasmus’s reform-minded readers. Martin Luther (1483–1546) drew upon Erasmus’s philology in preparing his German translation of the New Testament (1521) and, indeed, the well-known Protestant principle of sola scriptura can be regarded as a Lutheran radicalization of the humanist motto ad fontes – that is, an emphasis on the importance of returning ‘to the sources’ of the Christian faith.25 Alongside this emphasis, Luther insisted that the biblical concept of the spiritual priesthood of all believers meant that each Christian had the right to interpret Scripture for himself or herself, adding that the power to ‘test and judge what is right or wrong in matters of faith’ did not belong exclusively to the clerical estate.26 I mentioned already the circular co-implication of text and context. Here now is another rotation of that circle: Luther’s understanding of how an individual is to test and judge in matters of faith entails a distinction between the ‘letter’ and the ‘spirit’ such that the spiritual meaning ‘can only be understood by an interpreter who has opted already for the spiritual mode of existence beforehand. Yet, the decision for this mode of being is provoked by the reading of the Scriptures itself ’.27 Luther’s theological commitment to the Christological coherence of the Bible’s spiritual meaning (viz., justification of the sinner through the graceful action of God in Christ) secured for him a criterion by which to discern the Word of God in the words of the Bible. On this basis, Luther distinguished the rank of the New Testament books according to their Christological substance: the ‘true kernel and marrow of all the books’ consists of the Gospel according to John, the First Epistle of John, the Pauline letters (especially Romans, Galatians and Ephesians), and the First Epistle of Peter; a second tier includes the synoptic gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the 22

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Desiderius Erasmus, Ratio seu Methodus compendio perveniendi ad veram theologiam, quoted in Barton, The Nature of Biblical Criticism, 128. Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 195. Anthony Levi, Renaissance and Reformation: The Intellectual Genesis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 288. It should be noted that Luther was somewhat loath to admit this influence, and fellow reformer Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) recorded irritation that Luther was so unwilling to acknowledge his debt not just to Erasmus, but to humanists like Conrad Pellican, Johann Reuchlin, and Lorenzo Valla as well. See Mark U. Edwards, Jr, Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 99–100. See Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann, H. J. Grimm, et al., vol. 44 (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1966), 123–217 [135]. Werner Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (London: SCM, 1994), 33.

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Second Epistle of Peter and the Second and Third Epistles of John; in the third division Luther lumps the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistle of Jude, the Revelation to John and, most famously, that ‘epistle of straw’, the Epistle of James.28 Thus, when parts of the Bible seem to Luther to lack the Christological substance that defines his conception of Christian faith, he feels justified in marginalizing them relative to his Johannine and Pauline ‘canon within the canon’. What is of central importance for Luther’s biblical hermeneutics is that the Word of God in Christ speaks to the reader/auditor in such a way that the words become the Word addressed specifically to the individual: ‘That alone can be called Christian faith, which believes without wavering that Christ is the Saviour not only to Peter and to the saints but also to you.’29 Kierkegaard’s view of Luther is rather complicated (due partly to the fact that his ‘canon within the canon’ draws forward the Epistle of James and the synoptic gospels over against Luther’s Pauline and Johannine prioritization, about which more later). Nonetheless, Luther’s emphasis on the subjective appropriation of the Word was enough to elicit from Kierkegaard the rather enthusiastic response: ‘Marvelous! The category “for you” (subjectivity, inwardness) with which Either/Or ended (only the truth that edifies is truth for you) is exactly Luther’s.’30 That Kierkegaard was gratified to see in Luther a forerunner for his own well-known emphasis on subjectivity is clear here. But he also has some appreciation for the philological insights of the reformer, as well as those of Erasmus. For example, in a note on the relationship of imagination to philology in biblical interpretation, Kierkegaard argues that prior to the sixteenth century ‘the Holy Scriptures reflected themselves imaginatively in imagination’, and this made possible the entire range of ‘allegorical interpretation’.31 According to Kierkegaard, the danger here is that when allegory becomes the ‘primary mode of interpretation’ of Scripture, interpreters lose sight of the fact that Christ ‘was an individual hum[an] being, the apostle an individual hum[an] being, who in a prodigious effort dashed off a few words on a scrap of paper for a congregation’.32 Erasmus and the Reformation instigated ‘a sounder philological interpretation’,33 Kierkegaard maintained, and this helped to return interpretation to an understanding of Scripture as testimony by individual human beings about God’s role in their actual lives. The historical trajectory of the new philology was not entirely advantageous, however, and Kierkegaard complains that in the post-Reformation era and through the Enlightenment the discipline became so engrossed in its methods that, as he says, ‘now we are drowning in sound scholarly interpretation, and ‘it is quickly forgotten that the Bible is Holy Scripture’.34 As Kierkegaard sees it, the problem is that in the seventeenth and

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Martin Luther, ‘Preface to the New Testament’, in Luther’s Works, Volume 35: Word and Sacrament (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1960), 357–62 [362]. See also Hugh Pyper, ‘Kierkegaard’s Canon: The Constitution of the Bible and of the Authorship in Concluding Unscientific Postscript’, in Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2005, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser, together with K. Brian Söderquist (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2005), 53–70 [58]. Luther, ‘Sermon on Matthew 21.1–9, the First Sunday in Advent’, in Sermons of Martin Luther, ed. John Nicholas Lenker, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1983), 17–58 [21]. KJN 4, p. 274 / SKS 20, NB3:61, pp. 274–5. Kierkegaard indicates in this entry that he was reading Luther’s sermon on Mt. 21.1-9 for the first Sunday in Advent, from which I just quoted. See Martin Luther, En christelig Postille, sammendragen af Dr. Morten Luthers Kirke- og Huuspostiller, 2 volumes, trans. Jörgen Thisted (Copenhagen: den Wahlske Boghandling, 1828), vol. 1, 28; ASKB 283. KJN 7, p. 150 / SKS 23, NB16:78, p. 148. KJN 7, p. 150 / SKS 23, NB16:78, p. 148. KJN 7, p. 150 / SKS 23, NB16:78, p. 148. KJN 7, p. 150 / SKS 23, NB16:78, p. 148.

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eighteenth centuries philology became preoccupied with propositions that might either be verified or falsified, and tended to read the books of the Bible as material for ‘learned dissertations’.35 The outcome of this, he objects, was that the testimonies of Scripture were distorted ‘into teachings, doctrine,’ and biblical interpretation was objectified away from the imaginative process of reflecting oneself into the text: ‘They forget Paul entirely in favor of the scrap of paper he produced, which they treat in the most un-Pauline way.’36 Notably, the Enlightenment thinker to whom Kierkegaard was most obviously intellectually indebted, Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781), was clearly committed to just such a propositional hermeneutics.37 Lessing – who in his day might have been ‘the only one’, according to Kierkegaard, to have ‘freely and openly posed the problem of doubt in relation to Christianity’38 – is remembered in this connection both for publishing fragments from the unpublished dissertation Apology for Rational Worshippers of God by H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768) and for alerting readers to the ‘ugly, broad ditch’ that separates ‘the narrative of the evangelists’ and ‘accidental historical truths’ on the one side, from metaphysical and moral truths on the other.39 Lessing is willing to admit, if rather ironically, that he has ‘no objection to the statement that . . . Christ himself rose from the dead’.40 But resurrection, miraculous as that would be, could be no proof of the man’s divinity. And so, Lessing wonders, why ‘must I therefore accept it as true that this risen Christ was the Son of God?’41 The central claim here is that ‘historical truth cannot be demonstrated’.42 That is to say, a historical report about something someone professes to have witnessed cannot be cast syllogistically in terms of a necessary truth of reason that would remain true in an indubitable extra-historical sense. ‘The problem is that reports of fulfilled prophecies are not fulfilled prophecies; that reports of miracles are not miracles’, Lessing says, and the claim about God’s incarnation in Christ is not the sort of thing that admits of either verification or falsification through ‘reports’.43 Thus, with the rise of Enlightenment criticism, philological sophistication did not yield the ‘undistorted contact’ with the spiritual meaning of Scripture for which Erasmus had hoped. Instead, increased critical awareness of the biblical text as a historical document made for an intellectual climate in which, as Kierkegaard complains, ‘it is quickly forgotten that the Bible is Holy Scripture’.44 Granted, Kierkegaard’s statement here is rather totalizing, but it seems clear that the Enlightenment partition between ‘truths of reason’ and ‘historical truths’ seriously destabilized the referential plausibility of the biblical Weltanschauung, and it was perceived to undermine the Bible’s authority to contour

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KJN 7, p. 151 / SKS 23, NB16:78, p. 148. It was ‘in the 17th century’, Kierkegaard asserts, that ‘the understanding of Holy Scripture as doctrine r[ea]lly began’. KJN 7, p. 150 / SKS 23, NB16:78a, p. 148. KJN 7, p. 151 / SKS 23, NB16:78, p. 148. While Lessing’s importance for Kierkegaard’s authorship is undeniable (see, for example, the section entitled ‘Something about Lessing’ in CUP, 61–125 / SKS 7, 65–120), it is important to note that Kierkegaard developed a more critical attitude towards Lessing in his later years. In 1849, for example, he suggests that Lessing ridiculed Christianity without being ‘sufficiently dialectically developed to know what he was doing’. KJN 6, p. 93 / SKS 22, NB11:165, p. 97. JP 2:1637, p. 233 / SKP V B 64. Gotthold Lessing, ‘On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power ’, in Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1956), 51–6 [53–5]. Ibid., 54. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 52. KJN 7, p. 150 / SKS 23, NB16:78, p. 148.

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human lives. Lessing, for example, bristled at the expectation that one should form all ‘metaphysical and moral ideas’ according to ‘something against which my reason rebels’.45 Effectively, Lessing’s rationalism amalgamates the epistemology of G. W. Leibniz (1646– 1716), with its strict dichotomy between necessary truths of reason and contingent truths of experience, and the hermeneutics of Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), with its thesis that a historical narrative cannot make available the knowledge of God, since such knowledge could only ever be derived from indubitable universal ideas.46 And David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874), in his turn, drew upon all these figures and more, most notably the speculative philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831), in formulating his mythical interpretation of the Bible in The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835).47 In the year in which Strauss’s Leben Jesu was published, Kierkegaard was a theology student at the University of Copenhagen. While he never addressed Strauss’s famous work directly, Kierkegaard clearly became passing familiar with its narration of the history of biblical interpretation, along with its program of demythologization which ‘summarily declares Christianity to be a myth’, from the subscription he held between 1835 and 1838 to Zeitschrift für speculative Theologie, a journal edited by the prominent ‘left-wing’ proponent of Hegelianism, Bruno Bauer (1809–1882).48 Additionally, Kierkegaard refers to Leben Jesu in notes connected with the university lectures on dogmatics he attended by Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–1884).49 But Martensen, although he defended a version of speculative philosophy, critiqued the more radical dimensions of Strauss’s work. Alongside Martensen, Copenhagen University’s Theology Faculty had its detractors of speculative philosophical trends as well, the most notable of which was Kierkegaard’s New Testament professor, Henrik Nicolai Clausen (1793–1877). A moderate rationalist by intellectual temperament, Clausen had followed the Berlin lectures of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the theologian regarded by many as the ‘father of modern hermeneutics’; in his own New Testament Hermeneutics (1840) Clausen attempted to unify Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the affective dimension of human experience with a ‘scripturalism’ that would balance theology, philology and historical criticism. But this unification can only be expected within the ‘boundaries of the Church, where the text has a validity as Holy Scripture’,50 for otherwise when we speak of ‘interpretation’ the New Testament is ‘an object only for scholarship, not for faith’.51 This work was a follow-up to Clausen’s more famous Catholicism and Protestantism: Their Church Constitutions, Doctrines, and Rites (1825), in which Clausen takes the standard line that the criterion 45 46

47 48

49 50

51

Lessing, ‘On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power’, 54. For an analysis of the contextual circumstances that precipitated the Enlightenment partition between ‘truths of reason’ and ‘historical truths’, see Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Toulmin argues that the emergence of factionalism in Western Christianity triggered the desire in many Enlightenment intellectuals to decontextualize rationality from the contingencies of history. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu: Kritisch bearbeitet, 3rd edn (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1835–6). Zeitschrift für spekulative Theologie (Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler, 1836–8); ASKB 354–7. See CUP, 218 / SKS 7, 199. On Kierkegaard’s relationship to Strauss, see George Pattison, ‘Kierkegaard and Radical Demythologization’, in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 6: tome II (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 233– 53. On his relationship to Bauer, see David James and Douglas Moggach, ‘Bruno Bauer: Biblical Narrative, Freedom and Anxiety’, in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, Tome II: Theology, 1–21. KJN 2, pp. 292–308 / SKS 18, KK:2, pp. 318–37. Henrik Nicolai Clausen, Det Nye Testaments Hermeneutik (Copenhagen: Jens Hostrup Schultz, 1840), 69; ASKB 468. Clausen, Det Nye Testaments Hermeneutik, 64.

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of Catholicism is the ‘principle of the Church’ while the criterion of Protestantism is the ‘principle of Scripture’, with the primary feature distinguishing Clausen’s view from orthodox Lutheranism being his rationalist position that the biblical witness must be rationally comprehensible in order to be considered revelation.52 This stock distinction between a more ecclesial tradition and a more scriptural tradition, along with Clausen’s implication that the adjudicatory role of what counts as revelation should fall to rationalist professors, was perhaps regarded as innocuous by some readers, but the view outraged the dynamic pastor, poet and historian N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783–1872), who in the same year published The Church’s Reply.53 Grundtvig castigated Clausen’s ‘exegetical popery’ and contrasted it with his own ‘matchless discovery’ of the ‘ecclesiastical view’, namely, that the criterion of the Christian faith is the oral tradition – ‘the Living Word’ – embodied in the Lord’s Prayer, the baptismal and eucharistic words of institution and the creedal formulations that predate the Bible, and to which the Bible itself attests. This hermeneutical skirmish gained for both parties not a little notoriety. In their own time, the notoriety stemmed chiefly from Clausen’s successful libel suit against Grundtvig, but over the longer haul what has preserved it is the satirical treatment Grundtvig and his ‘matchless discovery’ receive in Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript: ‘the matchless discovery in its matchless absoluteness bears the unmistakable imprint of Grundtvigian originality’.54 It is an open question whether Clausen fared any better in Kierkegaard’s eyes. Hugh Pyper has suggested that Clausen’s importance for Kierkegaard is ‘still underestimated’55 and, indeed, Kierkegaard doubtless learned a thing or two from attending Clausen’s lectures on the synoptic gospels in 1832/3, and on the Acts of the Apostles in 1833/4, along with other lectures on biblical exegesis by Clausen’s colleagues in the theology faculty.56 Nonetheless, as we shall see, in none of his works could Kierkegaard ever endorse the rationalist view that divine revelation can be adjudicated by human reason. He would abide neither the ecclesiastical view that the church’s witness vouchsafes Scripture nor the speculative view that Scripture mythically represents the general features of a universal system. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s lifelong dissatisfaction with the whole enterprise of modern biblical criticism in its various guises is clear even from his students days, for it is in the year after he attended Clausen’s lectures on Acts that he penned in his journal, ‘on the whole the great mass of interpreters damage the understanding of the New Testament more than they benefit an understanding of it’.57 The threefold hermeneutics operative in Kierkegaard’s authorship, therefore, constitutes his attempt ‘to overlook them, if possible’ – that is, to enter into the world of the Bible without relying upon the commentators whom he thinks simply ‘block’ the way. Whether or not we should judge his attempt successful is a matter I address in my concluding remarks. First, however, let me elucidate just how I think Kierkegaard seeks to circumvent the dominant hermeneutical alternatives of his day.

52

53

54 55

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Henrik Nicolai Clausen, Catholicismens og Protestantismens Kirkeforfatning, Lære og Ritus (Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelin, 1825). Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, Kirkens Gienmæle, in Værker i Udvalg, 10 volumes, ed. Georg Christensen and Hal Koch (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1940–1949), vol. 2, 317–49. CUP, 36 / SKS 7, 43. Pyper, ‘Kierkegaard’s Canon: The Constitution of the Bible and of the Authorship in Concluding Unscientific Postscript’, 60. Wolfdietrich von Kloeden, ‘Biblestudy ’, in Kierkegaard’s View of Christianity, ed. Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels, 1978), 20–6. JP 1:202, p. 83 / SKS 27, Papir 67, p. 100.

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II. KIERKEGAARD’S CRITIQUE OF HISTORICAL-CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP From Kierkegaard’s earliest writings, he approached the Bible with imaginative freedom. Instead of following any methodological principles or rules for understanding and applying biblical texts, he inscribes verses and figures from the Bible in his own works such that the variety of ways he alludes to the Bible – both directly and obliquely – makes finding any one criterion of interpretation challenging. Often ‘Kierkegaard does not so much talk about the Bible as kaleidoscopically use it’,58 as Polk has remarked, and this feature frustrates hurried attempts to discern any one normative configuration of how Kierkegaard interprets the Bible. We might think of the multiple intertextual relationships as rather ‘like the boxes in a Chinese puzzle’, as the pseudonym Victor Eremita says of the various sections of Either/Or.59 Pons persuasively argues that Kierkegaard’s biblical imagination so suffuses his writing that its ‘invisible omnipresence’60 in his authorship constitutes a kind of ‘imitation of the Bible’.61 Read this way, just as the Bible itself contains ‘repetitions of phrases and sentences that can be considered as “quotations” [inscribing earlier texts within later ones] in which the exact original wording is rare’,62 so too Kierkegaard’s ‘imitation of the Bible’ configures and reconfigures the Bible ‘in a kind of spiral movement of imitation through deviations and reduplications – without authority’.63 The exposition of the rank upon rank of these allusions and deviations in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship is exemplary in Pons’s study, so I refer readers to her work for a full exposition of this quotational strategy. One example is enough to illustrate this practice in the present chapter, and arguably its locus classicus is the opening of Fear and Trembling. The central narrative of Fear and Trembling turns on the Genesis 22 story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac, but in the introductory ‘Exordium’ and the ‘Eulogy on Abraham’ Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author, scripts five ‘Abraham’ stories. Or, rather, as John Lippitt puts it, Silentio depicts four ‘sub-Abrahams’ who represent conceivable responses to the trial of the divine command, and one ‘real’ Abraham whom Silentio valorizes as the ‘knight of faith’.64 But, while it is arguable that Silentio’s ‘real’ Abraham reflects the Abraham of Genesis 22 more recognizably than the four ‘sub-Abrahams’, Silentio nonetheless writes his ‘real’ Abraham into the text of Fear and Trembling in ways that betray an interest in ‘the beautiful tapestry of imagination’, despite his protestation to the contrary.65 In Silentio’s hands, the narrative of Abraham’s binding of Isaac connects up with modern philosophical problems of ‘doubt’, ‘the ethical’ and the possibility of ‘going beyond faith’ in ways that imaginatively refract (and contest) nineteenth-century intellectual concerns that are nowhere obvious in the Genesis account. Moreover, with good reason Fear and Trembling is also often read in terms of Kierkegaard’s own biography (another nestled box in the puzzle).66 But by using Genesis 22 to interpret Kierkegaard’s willingness to sacrifice his engagement to Regine Olsen in

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard, 17. EO1, 9 / SKS 2, 16. Pons, Stealing a Gift, xv. Ibid., 146. Ibid., 104. Ibid., 135. John Lippitt, Kierkegaard and ‘Fear and Trembling’ (London: Routledge, 2003), 23. FT, 9 / SKS 4, 105. See Lippitt, Kierkegaard and ‘Fear and Trembling’, 5–7, 138–9.

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the hope that their relationship might somehow be preserved, what the ‘real’ Abraham’s faith has come to mean in Fear and Trembling is quite different from what it meant for the Elohist who first transcribed the story from oral tradition.67 Is this a problem? The question revolves around whether Fear and Trembling so emphasizes what the narrative has (or can) ‘come to mean’ that ‘what it meant’ gets neglected.68 Modern biblical criticism has ended to prioritize the ostensibly objective historical-critical matter of ascertaining what a text meant in its original Sitz im Leben. But, Silentio rhetorically questions, ‘what is the value of going to the trouble of remembering that past which cannot become a present’?69 His priority, therefore, seems to be that of ascertaining the different ways a past can become reconfigured as a present reality for an interpreter. It is surely with such a theme in mind that Paul Ricoeur speaks of ‘appropriation’ as ‘the existential category par excellence’, and it seems plausible that Kierkegaard would agree with Ricoeur’s characterization.70 But if that is the case, then surely one is justified in asking whether it is not possible to appropriate the Bible in just about any fashion one likes. And then we might also wonder whether there is any point to talking about hermeneutics at all (where the goal is to arrive at the most fitting interpretation – one where it makes sense to say X interpretation is better than Y) and say instead that ‘interpretation’ is all just free and imaginative play and deferral. Kierkegaard clearly imagines this possibility, for he has the aesthete of Either/Or pen the words: ‘My life is utterly meaningless. When I consider its various epochs, my life is like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which first of all means a string, and second a daughter-in-law. All that is lacking is that in the third place the word Schnur means a camel, in the fourth a whisk broom.’71 One might derive a sense of exhilaration from the insight that meaning is not definitely fixed, and that one is therefore at liberty to reconfigure inherited assumptions through the exercise of one’s own imagination. But here we see that such heady freedom also has a shadow side. For on the fatalistic view of the aesthete, the Schnur of his life (definition 1) is simply ‘one of the threads’ which the Fates have ‘spun into the calico of life’. And once he comes to regard this fabric of his life as ‘utterly meaningless’ (since it can mean anything and, thus, nothing in particular) he would just as soon ‘cut the thread’.72 As I mentioned in the first section, Kierkegaard uses this textile metaphor in other contexts as well and, notably, such meaninglessness is not a risk run by aesthetic ironists alone. On the contrary, six years after the publication of Either/Or, Kierkegaard’s preeminently Christian pseudonym Anti-Climacus maintains that earnest scholars face the problem of the never-ending deferral of meaning as well. This is because when it comes to the matter of interpretation one can ‘sew without fastening the end and without knotting the thread, and this is why, wonder of wonders, [one] can go on sewing and sewing . . . pulling the thread through’ without ever reaching any definite meaning.73 What then

67

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69 70

71 72 73

Regarding the attribution of Gen. 22.1-19 to the Elohist, see Terence E. Fretheim, ‘Genesis’, in The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 1, ed. Leander E. Keck et al. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 494. Krister Stendahl’s hermeneutical model proposes this distinction between ‘what a text meant’ and ‘what it might come to mean’. See Krister Stendahl, ‘Biblical Theology: A Program’, in Meanings: The Bible as Document and Guide (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), 11–44. FT, 30 / SKS 4, 126. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Hermeneutics’, in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 89–101 [99]. Emphasis original. EO1, 36 / SKS 2, 45. EO1, 31 / SKS 2, 40. SUD, 93 / SKS 11, 206.

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might provide a criterion of meaningfulness? What might be an appropriate candidate for the kind of focal ‘concern’ that constitutes an individual’s ‘relation to life’?74 In The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus affirms that Christianity is discontinuous with the conventions of merely human interpretation. ‘Christianity’, he says, ‘fastens the end by means of the paradox.’75 In Christianity, on this view, we are supposed to discover the knot that holds; the bright centre for the kaleidoscopic play of light; the solution – for faith, and contrary to human expectation – to the puzzle of life’s meaning. In its biblical specification, ‘the paradox’ is the Word made flesh, the eternal in time, the Godman – Christ. In Practice in Christianity, Anti-Climacus insists that Jesus Christ as attested in the New Testament ‘is the paradox that history can never digest or convert into an ordinary syllogism’.76 Since a focus on Christ as paradox is said to ‘fasten’ biblical interpretation somehow – yet through some means other than either historiography or syllogistic reasoning – it is here that we should fix our attention. Kierkegaard develops the conception of ‘the paradox’ most fully in the Johannes Climacus works, Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Indeed, envisioned as ‘the absolute paradox’, the god-man is at the very heart of the Johannes Climacus works.77 The challenge that Climacus’s conception of ‘the absolute paradox’ poses for New Testament hermeneutics, however, is that it seems to be fastened only ever so loosely to the biblical text. For on Climacus’s view: ‘Even if the contemporary generation had not left anything behind except these words, “We have believed that in such and such a year the god appeared in the humble form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died” – this is more than enough.’78 Polk refers to this as Climacus’s ‘notorious reduction of the significance of the historical material in the Gospels’, which easily reads as an ‘implicit trivialization . . . of the four-fold character of the canonical story’.79 Granted, Polk goes on to argue that it would be a mistake to regard Climacus’s ‘notorious reduction’ as Kierkegaard’s own; the relationship between Kierkegaard and this pseudonym is more complicated than that, and Kierkegaard does not wish to trivialize the New Testament story. But it is equally mistaken, I think, to move too quickly beyond Climacus’s reduction and overlook the fact that Kierkegaard articulates one of his key hermeneutical positions through Climacus. This ‘notorious reduction’ serves as a caveat to remind the reader that no matter how significant any historical material in the gospels might be, it can never be so significant as to warrant on ‘objective’ grounds (i.e. either historical-critically or in terms of the logic of speculative philosophy) the paradoxical conclusion that Jesus was the eternal God temporally incarnate. Climacus addresses this ‘Objective Issue of the Truth of Christianity’ in Part One of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which he subdivides into two chapters, one treating ‘The Historical Point of View’, and another ‘The Speculative Point of View’. The former of these is subdivided into three further sections entitled, respectively, ‘Holy Scripture’, ‘The Church’ and ‘The

74 75 76 77

78 79

SUD, 5 / SKS 11, 117. SUD, 93 / SKS 11, 206. PC, 30 / SKS 12, 35. Regarding the relationship between Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus and himself, Kierkegaard writes, ‘J. Climacus and Anti-Climacus have several things in common, but the difference is that while J. C. places himself so low that he even claims that he isn’t Xn, one seems to sense that Anti-C. considers himself to be Xn to an extraordinary degree . . . I positioned myself above J. C., below Anti-C.’ KJN 6, p. 127 / SKS 22, NB11:209, p. 130. PF, 104 / SKS 4, 300. Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard, 17.

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Evidence of the Centuries for the Truth of Christianity’. Only the first of these addresses biblical hermeneutics explicitly, but since he sets up the other discussions in order to explore possible alternatives to the first, a quick review is appropriate here. Climacus opens the first chapter with the claim that ‘nothing is easier to perceive than this, that with regard to the historical the greatest certainty is only an approximation, and an approximation is too little to build [one’s] happiness on and is so unlike an eternal happiness that no result can ensue’.80 Thus, whether one places one’s hope for objective results in the ostensibly ‘secure stronghold’ of biblical research (where, as for Clausen and other modern critics reviewed in the previous section, ‘the important thing is to secure Scripture historically-critically’81), or in the ‘Living Word’ of the church (where, as for Grundtvig and his followers, the burden of proof is to be able to demonstrate that the church hasn’t changed decisively over time, that ‘the present Church, is the apostolic Church’82), or even in the supposed reliability of the longevity of the Christian hypothesis in history (where the difficulty is to demonstrate that ‘habit and routine’ have not actually become ‘a diversionary power that is extremely distracting’,83 so that people ‘do not notice the secret that their talk about their eternal happiness is an affectation because it is devoid of passion, and therefore it might as well be built on matchstick arguments’84), the ‘objective issue’ remains that in each of these three historical perspectives one receives nothing decisive for faith; ‘Alas, the trouble is that in relation to a historical fact I can obtain only an approximation.’85 Considered from ‘The Speculative Point of View’ the issue is somewhat different, but not decisively so with respect to the subjective appropriation of the biblical claim about God in Christ. The speculative thinker is not interested in the biblical text on its own terms (and perhaps for this reason Climacus does not explicitly address the issue of the speculative interpretation of the Bible itself). Rather, the speculative thinker conceives of the biblical witness as one among many historical expressions of Spirit (even if it is also the consummate expression), and thinks this ‘in such a way that finally Christianity itself is the eternal thought’.86 Here Climacus implicates ‘the Hegelian notion that the outer is the inner and the inner the outer’87 in his critique of the speculative thinker as an individual so concerned with ascertaining the logic of Absolute Spirit’s objective manifestations in and through ‘the necessity of a historical phenomenon’88 that such a thinker neglects his own subjective spirit and, with this, his personal relationship to the divine. In this way, according to Climacus, a speculative thinker manages not even to ‘raise the issue we are discussing, because as a speculative thinker he becomes precisely too objective to concern himself with his eternal happiness’.89 At this point a speculative thinker, were she so inclined, might wish to reply that such a merely subjective concern for one’s eternal happiness falls rather short of the full witness to Spirit’s objectification

80 81 82

83 84 85 86 87 88 89

CUP, 23 / SKS 7, 30. Emphasis original. CUP, 24 / SKS 7, 31. CUP, 39 / SKS 7, 45. Climacus explicitly declines speaking about Roman Catholicism in this connection. See CUP, 34 / SKS 7, 41. CUP, 47 / SKS 7, 53. CUP, 47 / SKS 7, 53. CUP, 44 / SKS 7, 49. CUP, 50 / SKS 7, 54. CUP, 54 / SKS 7, 58. CUP, 53 / SKS 7, 58. CUP, 55 / SKS 7, 59.

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in history which Christianity is supposed to represent. But Climacus gives no quarter on the matter: ‘Christianity cannot be observed objectively, precisely because it wants to lead the subject to the ultimate point of his subjectivity, and when the subject is thus properly positioned, he cannot tie his eternal happiness to speculative thought.’90 To what, then, can one ‘tie’ one’s eternal happiness? As Climacus first states in Philosophical Fragments and then repeats verbatim in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ‘As is well known, Christianity is the only historical phenomenon that despite the historical – indeed, precisely by means of the historical – has wanted to be the single individual’s point of departure for his eternal consciousness, has wanted to interest him otherwise than merely historically, has wanted to base his happiness on his relation to something historical.’91 The paradox of faith that corresponds (subjectively) to ‘the absolute paradox’ of the incarnation is that this ‘something historical’ which is to secure one’s eternal consciousness and, indeed, happiness, cannot be observed ‘historically-critically’ by any individual in his or her role as a biblical ‘research scholar’.92 All ‘objective’ attempts to secure knowledge of the truth or (falsity) of Christianity fail here, according to Climacus, because by focusing objectively on the Bible (or the church, or historical longevity and influence, or ‘the System’) one approaches the matter in a way that can never correspond to the kind of truth Christianity is supposed to instantiate. On Climacus’s analogy, such an objective approach is rather like someone who seeks to discover whether or not she loves her marriage partner by examining ‘its mark in the external world’.93 One can, of course, evaluate a marriage this way, for a marriage ‘constitutes a phenomenon in existence (on a smaller scale, just as Christianity world-historically has left its mark on all of life)’.94 But one is not thereby grasping the subjective experience of ‘married love’ for, no matter how many historical effects it produces, the inter-subjective relationship ‘is not a historical phenomenon’.95 Consequently, the question of whether or not the relationship is one of ‘true love’ cannot even arise as an ‘objective issue’. Moreover, just as we say two individuals ‘tie the knot’ by affirming the invisible love of and for the other in their marriage covenant, so too, on this view, one who wishes to ‘become a Christian’ secures her eternal consciousness (subjectivity) through a leap of trust beyond understanding that ‘ties eternal happiness’ to a paradoxical love relationship with Jesus Christ who truly becomes for the believer God’s Word incarnate. If this vision of true love for the divine is definitive of Christianity, as Climacus maintains, then all appeals to objectivity in the matter are misleading.

III. HISTORY TRANSFIGURED AS SACRED HISTORY The preceding overview has sketched the Kierkegaardian view of how not to interpret the Bible if one seeks in Christianity to secure one’s eternal consciousness and, indeed, happiness. But beyond these negative historical-critical results, can Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms commend anything positive for biblical hermeneutics? How does one transition from reading the Bible as a purely historical text (‘objective as calico’,96 something 90 91 92 93 94 95 96

CUP, 57 / SKS 7, 60. PF, 109 / SKS 4, 305; CUP, 15 / SKS 7, 24. CUP, 24 / SKS 7, 31. CUP, 54 / SKS 7, 58. CUP, 54 / SKS 7, 58. CUP, 54 / SKS 7, 58. FSE, 39/ SKS 13, 66.

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on which interpreters can ‘sew without fastening the end’97) to reading the Bible as ‘God’s Word’? In order to discover this, we need to ascertain both the similarities and differences between Climacus’s biblical hermeneutics and Kierkegaard’s own. Polk is clearly right when he says that Climacus reduces ‘the significance of the historical material in the Gospels’, whereas Kierkegaard places considerable emphasis ‘on the imitation of Christ when he writes under his own name in the religious discourses’.98 But I want to cavil a bit about Polk’s assertion that the former ‘belies’ the latter, if by ‘belies’ he means that Climacus and Kierkegaard disagree about what ‘the historical material in the Gospels’ demonstrates. On this issue I think both Climacus and Kierkegaard agree: ‘historical material’ demonstrates nothing for paradoxical faith insofar as no historical material could ever validate the Christian witness that Jesus was the incarnate Word of God, and it is in terms of that Christological witness that one concerned with ‘becoming a Christian’ is first and foremost interested in the man Jesus. In Kierkegaard’s own words, ‘For however paradoxical it is, this is true and this is Christian: With regard to Christ, the historical details are not nearly as important as they are with regard to Socrates and other such people, precisely because Christ is Christ, an eternal presence [en evig Nærværende], because he is the true God.’99 This claim is made even more starkly by Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym who is supposed to represent Christianity in the eminent sense. In a section of Practice in Christianity headed by the question, Can One Come to Know Something about Christ from History? Anti-Climacus answers, No. Why not? Because one cannot know anything at all about Christ; he is the paradox, the object of faith, exists only for faith. But all historical communication is the communication of knowledge; consequently one can come to know nothing about Christ from history. For if one comes to know little or much or something about him, he is not the one he in truth is. Thus one comes to know something about him that is different from what he is. One comes to know nothing about him or one comes to know something incorrect about him – one is deceived. History makes Christ into someone else than he is in truth, and thus from history we come to know much about – Christ? No, not about Christ, for about him nothing can be known; he can only be believed.100 Beneath this disavowal of historical knowledge about Christ lies a more fundamental distinction between ‘world history’ and ‘sacred history’, where the former is the ostensibly objective sort, and the latter begins not in historical observations or scholarly research but in the subjective appropriation of faith, and so is ‘qualitatively different from history in general’.101 But this distinction only serves to reinforce the epistemological scepticism of Johannes Climacus’s ‘notorious reduction’ and, consequently, Johannes Climacus, 97 98

99 100 101

SUD, 93 / SKS 11, 206. Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard, 17. The entire passage reads as follows: ‘Climacus’s notorious reduction of the significance of the historical material in the Gospels to the simple claim that at such and such a time and place one Jesus of Nazareth lived and died – and his implicit trivialization thereby of the four-fold character of the canonical story – belies the emphasis Kierkegaard places on the imitation of Christ when he writes under his own name in the religious discourses.’ We might note here that, in fact, Climacus ‘reduces’ the historical material even more than Polk suggests, for the passage in question makes no mention of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, but simply reads, ‘Even if the contemporary generation had not left anything behind except these words, “We have believed that in such and such a year the god appeared in the humble form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died” – this is more than enough.’ PF, 104 / SKS 4, 300. KJN 4, p. 330 / SKS 20, NB4:81, pp. 328–9. PC, 25–6 / SKS 12, 30–1. Emphasis original. PC, 30 / SKS 12, 35.

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Kierkegaard and Anti-Climacus all seem to agree that Christ ‘is the paradox that history can never digest or convert into an ordinary syllogism’.102 Given this threefold agreement about the insignificance of the ‘historical material’ for faith, it seems Kierkegaard would wish to resist the suggestion that his mature emphasis on ‘the imitation of Christ’ builds upon any ‘historical material’ about the life of Christ qua ‘history’.103 Granted, as Polk says, in Kierkegaard’s engagement with the Bible his interpretative praxis outstrips his hermeneutical theory.104 But this does not mean Kierkegaard’s interpretative praxis ever contradicts his views about the insignificance of the gospels qua ‘historical material’ in the objective sense. In fact, Kierkegaard can be just as sardonic as his pseudonym on the matter: Look, perhaps there are several variations [of any given book of the Bible], and perhaps a new manuscript has just been found – good Lord! – and the prospect of new variations, and perhaps there are five interpreters with one opinion and seven with another and two with a strange opinion and three who are wavering or have no opinion, and ‘I myself am not absolutely sure about the meaning of this passage, or, to speak my mind, I agree with the three wavering interpreters who have no opinion’ etc.105 But if Kierkegaard and Anti-Climacus agree with Johannes Climacus with respect to what historical scholarship can and cannot establish about Christ, does this mean I wish to lump them together and say of all three what Polk says of Climacus, namely, that their works tend toward an ‘implicit trivialization . . . of the four-fold character of the canonical story’?106 No, for such a reading would have no way to account for the fuller and more explicit testimonial use of gospel material in the signed works and in Practice in Christianity. Clearly there are hermeneutical differences between Climacus, on the one hand, and Kierkegaard and Anti-Climacus, on the other. But these differences are different not by virtue of how they evaluate the significance of historical scholarship for faith, but by virtue of how they engage Scripture despite the insistence that such scholarship demonstrates nothing for faith. We might imagine that something like the distinction adumbrated in Fear and Trembling between the ‘knight of infinite resignation’ and the ‘knight of faith’ might also be appropriate here, mutatis mutandis. Readers will recall that the knight of infinite resignation is one who is prepared to resign his claim on the finite things cared for when this is demanded of him: The act of resignation does not require faith, for what I gain in resignation is my eternal consciousness. This is a purely philosophical movement that I venture to make when it is demanded and can discipline myself to make, because every time some finitude will take power over me, I starve myself into submission until I make the movement, for my eternal consciousness is my love for God, and for me that is the highest of all.107

102 103

104 105 106 107

PC, 30 / SKS 12, 35. As Anti-Climacus remarks within the context of Practice in Christianity, ‘Here and throughout the book, “history” is to be understood as profane history, world history, history directly understood in contradistinction to sacred history.’ PC, 25 / SKS 12, 30. Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard, 17. FSE, 32 / SKS 13, 59. Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard, 17. FT, 48 / SKS 4, 142.

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The ‘knight of faith’, on the other hand, is described as one who ‘does exactly the same as the other knight did . . . But then the marvel happens; he makes one more movement even more wonderful than all the others, for he says: Nevertheless I have faith’.108 This account of the ‘double movement of faith appears to include and absorb the knight’s resignation into ‘something far higher’.109 Whereas ‘through resignation I renounce everything’, the ‘far higher’ double movement of faith incorporates and relativizes the resignation: ‘By faith I do not renounce anything; on the contrary, by faith I receive everything exactly in the sense in which it is said that one who has faith like a mustard seed can move mountains.’110 The reference here is, of course, to the parable Jesus tells in Mt. 17.20, and Silentio immediately follows this with a reference to the parable of the rich young man who came to Jesus and asked what he must do to inherit the kingdom of heaven: ‘By virtue of resignation, that rich young man should have given away everything, but if he had done so, then the knight of faith would have said to him: By virtue of the absurd, you will get every penny back again – believe it!’111 Is this rather dizzying dynamic of sublation operative elsewhere in Kierkegaardian biblical hermeneutics as well? On the analogy I wish to propose, Johannes Climacus can be read as a knight of infinite resignation: he renounces all the historical claims about the life of Christ, but does not ‘get it all back’ in terms of ‘paradoxical faith’. Like Silentio, Johannes Climacus is ‘infinitely interested’ in what the Bible attests. He is fixated on ‘the absolute paradox’. He denies, however, that he has Christian faith.112 On the other hand, Kierkegaard (as one who speaks from the position of one who is ‘becoming a Christian’) and Anti-Climacus (as one who is a Christian in the eminent sense) both incorporate the insight that the historical material demonstrates nothing about the incarnation, but in faith they appropriate the biblical material nonetheless. In this sense, they ‘get it all back’ not as ‘history’, but transfigured into ‘sacred history’. Or, in Kierkegaard’s more direct language, they appropriate the biblical material as ‘God’s Word’.

IV. THE SUBJECTIVE APPROPRIATION OF THE TEXT It is precisely as ‘God’s Word’ that Kierkegaard speaks of the Bible in For Self-Examination. Although not as well known as the discussion of biblical scholarship in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the first section of For Self-Examination constitutes Kierkegaard’s most robust and sustained discussion of biblical interpretation, and indicates the manner in which he thinks a faithful reader ‘gets the Bible back’, as it were. Building upon an introductory section in which he claims that ‘true Lutheranism’ paradoxically entails ‘works and nevertheless grace’,113 Kierkegaard proposes to counterbalance the Reformation emphasis on the ‘major premise’ of grace with a renewed attention to the ‘minor premise’ of works. Thus, whereas in an age when ‘everything had become works’ Luther believed the Apostle James needed to ‘be shoved aside’,114 Kierkegaard viewed his contemporary era as one in which ‘the Apostle James must be drawn forward a little, not for works

108 109 110 111 112 113 114

FT, 46 / SKS 4, 141. FT, 47 / SKS 4, 142. FT, 48–9 / SKS 4, 143. FT, 49 / SKS 4, 143. See Mt. 19.16-22; Mk 10.17-22; Lk. 18.18-23. CUP, 617 / SKS 7, 560. FSE, 17 / SKS 13, 46. FSE, 15–16 / SKS 13, 44–5; FSE, 24 / SKS 13, 52.

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against faith . . . but for faith, in order, if possible . . . to prevent grace, faith and grace as the only redemption and salvation, from being taken totally in vain, from becoming a camouflage even for a refined worldliness’.115 Thus, in posing the question contained in his title, ‘What is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?’, Kierkegaard orients his reflection vis-à-vis a passage from the Epistle of James that emphasizes works: But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act – they will be blessed in their doing. If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for the orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.116 Arguably, the clearest sense of this passage is at the moral level where readers are enjoined to conform their actions to what they profess to be true in their words. But the text contextualizes this ethical injunction in a theological register that indicates that ‘the word’ to which readers’ actions must conform is ‘the implanted word that has the power to save your souls’.117 The ‘word’, then, is the Gospel attesting to God’s Word in Christ. And, as Kierkegaard journals in the publication year of For Self-Examination, the difference between scholarship and faith ‘is the same with the concept [“]Holy Scripture[”] as with the concept “God-Man” ’, for the transition of faith by which one sees in Jesus the Word of God is the same as that by which one reads the Bible and encounters God’s Word.118 In For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard seeks to uncover ‘what is required’ in order for this transition to transpire. How, then, should an earnest reader regard the Bible? Over the course of the discourse, Kierkegaard sets out three requirements which each refer back to the image of the mirror taken from James’s epistle. The first requirement is that you must not look at the mirror, observe the mirror, but must see yourself in the mirror.119 The second requirement is that in order to see yourself in the mirror when you read God’s Word you must (so that you actually do come to see yourself in the mirror) remember to say to yourself incessantly: It is I to whom it speaking; it is I about whom it is speaking.120 And Finally, if you want to look at yourself in the mirror with true blessing, you must not promptly forget how you looked, you must not be the forgetful hearer (or reader) of

115 116 117 118 119 120

FSE, 24 / SKS 13, 52. Jas 1.22-7. Jas 1.21. KJN 8, p. 146 / SKS 24, NB22:86, p. 149. FSE, 25 / SKS 13, 53. Emphasis original. FSE, 35 / SKS 13, 62. Emphasis original.

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whom the apostles says: He looked at his bodily face in a mirror but promptly forgot how he looked.121 The subjective dimension of this set of requirements is plain to see here. Once again, what is at stake is not the ‘objective issue’, but the truth of God’s Word ‘for you’. Indeed, the reader who reads objectively in a ‘scholarly’ fashion is said not to read God’s Word at all: ‘If you are a scholar, remember that if you do not read God’s Word in another way, it will turn out that after a lifetime of reading God’s Word many hours every day, you nevertheless have never read – God’s Word.’122 As we have seen, Kierkegaard is not unaware of the various complicating hermeneutical issues – historical-critical questions such as, ‘how much belongs to “God’s Word”? Which books are authentic? Are they really by the apostles, and are the apostles really trustworthy? Have they personally seen everything, or have they perhaps only heard about various things from others? As for ways of reading, there are thirty thousand different ways’.123 But these questions and different ways of reading – critical as they might be for scholarship (and Kierkegaard insists that he does ‘not disparage scholarship’124) – are misleading insofar as it can seem ‘as if all this research and pondering and scrutinizing would draw God’s Word very close to me; the truth is that this is the very way, this is the most cunning way, to remove God’s Word as far as possible from me’.125 He seems to be saying here that the prolixity of biblical scholarship too easily heaps on layer after layer of human words about the biblical texts, rather than simply allowing God’s Word to speak to the reader through the words of the Bible. Or, to use the image of the mirror: examining the mirror itself leads away from rightly seeing oneself in the light of God’s Word, whereas it is only by examining oneself in the mirror that God’s Word can actually speak to the reader and about the reader. But is the meaning of this image still somewhat opaque? After all, we tend not to encounter mirrors that speak (apart from fairy tales), and it is not clear that this metaphor alone could be adequate to ‘God’s Word’. It is perhaps for this reason that Kierkegaard supplements the apostle’s mirror metaphor with another of his own. He asks us to ‘imagine a lover who has received a letter from his beloved – I assume that God’s Word is just as precious to you as this letter is to the lover. I assume that you read and think you ought to read God’s Word in the same way the lover reads this letter.’126 To the objection that his metaphor fails because the Bible is written in a foreign language, Kierkegaard remarks that it is ‘really only scholars who need to read Holy Scripture in the original language’.127 But if one insists upon reading Scripture in the original, then he is willing to develop his metaphor such that one ‘distinguishes between reading and reading, between reading with a dictionary and reading the letter from his beloved’.128 In the first instance, one is not yet reading the letter, but simply working through the ‘scholarly preliminaries as a necessary evil’ to come to the point of reading the letter.129 Thus, Kierkegaard allows

121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

FSE, 44 / SKS 13, 70. Emphasis original. FSE, 33 / SKS 13, 60. FSE, 25 / SKS 13, 53. FSE, 28 / SKS 13, 56. FSE, 35 / SKS 13, 62. FSE, 26 / SKS 13, 54. FSE, 26 / SKS 13, 54. FSE, 27 / SKS 13, 55. FSE, 27 / SKS 13, 55.

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that a case can be made for the use of a dictionary in getting the letter into readable form. What he cannot abide is the idea of involving others in the process of reading the letter. He sketches a scenario in which an acquaintance drops by as the lover is translating the letter and casually observes, ‘Well, so you are reading a letter from your beloved.’ To this the lover responds, Have you gone mad? Do you think this is reading a letter from my beloved! No, my friend, I am sitting here toiling and moiling with a dictionary to get it translated. At times I am ready to explode with impatience; the blood rushes to my head and I would just as soon hurl the dictionary on the floor – and you call that reading – you must be joking! No, thank God, I am soon finished with the translation and then, yes, then, I shall read my beloved’s letter; that is something altogether different . . . I would ever so much like to have you stay, but, to be honest, I have no time. There is still something left to translate and I am so impatient to begin reading it – therefore do not be angry, but please go so I can finish!130 And then, after the translation is finished, the lover says to himself, ‘I will make sure that it does not happen [again]; before I begin such a thing [i.e. reading the letter in the proper sense], I lock my door and am not at home. I want to be alone, uninterruptedly alone with the letter; if I am not, then neither am I reading the letter from my beloved.’131 Although there is a humorous dimension to this imagined scenario, it is probably impossible to overestimate how earnest Kierkegaard is about the need to be alone with the text in order to read God’s Word. Indeed, the views of others are to be scrupulously avoided. In a journal entry penned as he prepared the text of For Self-Examination, he characterized his ‘Principal Rule’ for reading the Bible as follows: Above all, read the N.T. without a commentary. Would it ever occur to a lover to read a letter from his beloved with a commentary! A commentator is an extremely dangerous interference in connection with everything that makes a qualitative claim of having purely personal significance for me. If the letter from the beloved were in a language I did not understand – well, then I learn the language – but I do not read the letter with commentaries by others. I read it, and because the thought of the beloved is truly present to me, and there is the intention, in everything, to will as the beloved wills and wishes: then I will surely understand it. It is the same with the Holy Scriptures. With God’s help I will surely understand them. Every commentator detracts. The person who can sit with 10 open commentaries and read the Holy Scriptures – well, perhaps he will write the 11th, but he is associating with the Holy Scriptures contra naturam.132 Kierkegaard’s explicit ‘principal rule’ for reading the Bible, then, is that each individual (‘suppose now that this letter from the lover had the odd feature that every single pers[on] was the loved one’133) should simply take it up and read it as ‘an expression of affection’134 from God, without taking recourse to the counsel of others. We might wonder, of course, whether Kierkegaard followed this principal rule in his own actual practice since, after

130 131 132 133 134

FSE, 27 / SKS 13, 55. FSE, 30 / SKS 13, 58. KJN 7, pp. 153–4 / SKS 23, NB16:84, p. 151. KJN 7, p. 450 / SKS 23, NB20:88, p. 442. FSE, 27 / SKS 13, 55.

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all, he did own quite a few volumes in biblical theology, although he does not often refer to them after his student days. Moreover, we might question whether such a rule is sensu stricto practicable, since any reader’s own assumptions and commitments will inevitably develop in various dynamic configurations of conformity and tension with the views and practices (living ‘commentaries’, sensu lato) of the various communities to which one belongs. Thus, for example, even while Kierkegaard criticizes Danish ‘Christendom’ for the way ‘the majority’ regards the Bible as ‘an obsolete ancient book’ and ‘a minority read it more or less learnedly, that is, nevertheless do not read God’s Word’,135 he still appeals to ‘the excellent Lutheran doctrine’136 that in large part shapes the interpretative horizon he shares with his contemporaries. I think Kierkegaard might have been willing to acknowledge such considerations, but I expect he also would have wished to claim that they nonetheless miss his point. For his aim is not to deny that we read in terms of interpretative horizons, but rather to insist that God’s Word establishes a subjective relationship with the Divine Lover that reconfigures one’s horizon and gives a new perspective on every other feature of life. And what of the various complications one sometimes meets in interpreting the Bible? Kierkegaard, we saw already, was well aware of such difficulties and anticipated this question: ‘But’, you perhaps say, ‘there are so many obscure passages in the Bible, whole books that are practically riddles.’ To that I would answer: Before I have anything to do with this objection, it must be made by someone whose life manifests that he has scrupulously complied with all the passages that are easy to understand; is this the case with you? Yet this is how the lover would respond to the letter – if there were obscure passages but also clearly expressed wishes, he would say, ‘I must immediately comply with the wish – then I will see about the obscure parts. How could I ever sit down and ponder the obscure passages and not comply with the wish, the wish that I clearly understood.’137 Here Kierkegaard returns to the opening line of the passage from the Epistle of James: ‘Be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves’ (Jas 1.22). And he maintains the love letter metaphor by asking us to assume that the letter communicates ‘not only an expression of affection’, but that it communicates also ‘clearly expressed wishes’.138 Interestingly, Kierkegaard does not mention the clearly expressed wishes communicated in the final verse of the James passage, but supplies a list comprised of various other wishes expressed in God’s Word: ‘It is all too easy to understand the requirement contained in God’s Word (“Give all your goods to the poor.” “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the left.” “If anyone takes your coat, let him have your cloak also.” “Rejoice always.” “Count it sheer joy when you meet various temptations” etc.).’139 In other words, Kierkegaard really does not think it matters much whether or not one understands all the ambiguous and cryptic elements in Scripture. Indeed, the

135 136 137 138 139

FSE, 33 / SKS 13, 60. FSE, 24 / SKS 13, 52. FSE, 29 / SKS 13, 57. FSE, 29 / SKS 13, 57. FSE, 34 / SKS 13, 61. See Mt. 19.21, 5.39-40; I Thess. 5.16; and Jas 1.2. The final verse of the James passage (1.27) reads, ‘Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.’

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history of scholarship would seem to demonstrate clearly enough that the process of ascertaining the meanings of various obscurities in Scripture will always remain one of approximations and contested interpretations. But the ‘tragic misuse of scholarship’,140 according to Kierkegaard, is that it encourages readers to think they need to discover the meaning of what they do not understand before they can act upon what they do understand. What is more, he suggests that one reason readers focus attention on the obscure passages is precisely in order to avoid the inconvenience and difficulty of having to act on what is easily understood: I cunningly shove in, one layer after another, interpretation and scholarly research, and more scholarly research (much in the way a boy puts napkins or more under his pants when he is going to get a licking) . . . I shove all this between the Word and myself and then give this interpreting and scholarliness the name of earnestness and zeal for the truth, and then allow this preoccupation to swell to such prolixity that I never come to look at myself in the mirror.141 Ignoring the fact that this parenthetical reference to a boy expecting a ‘licking’ seems somewhat jarring alongside the metaphor of the love letter, it is hard to deny that he makes a point here. If one does not wish to give to the poor, turn the other cheek, rejoice in adversity, and the rest, well, then a reader can at least tell himself he takes Scripture seriously if he nonetheless spends some time trying to understand what it reveals about social conditions in the ancient Near East, for example, or the relationship between the book of Genesis and antecedent Mesopotamian creation myths, or the historical formation of the New Testament canon, and so on. There are more than enough ‘layers’ to explore, and having the freedom to explore them is in many respects more attractive that being asked to imitate Christ. But the key difference between ‘scholarly research’ and ‘reading God’s Word’ as Kierkegaard sees it is not the ‘layering’ itself, but rather the direction in which the layering orients the reader. After all, Kierkegaard depicts a multilayered process as well: interpreting the words of the Bible is said to disclose ‘God’s Word’, most fully attested in the ‘Word made flesh’, and communicated in a ‘love letter’ that expresses not only affection but also the exhortation to ‘do the word’, along with the instruction to see one’s reflection in the ‘mirror of the word’, which presumably reveals either that one’s life reflects the life of Christ or that one’s reflection of the Word is dim and distorted. So, whereas the layers of research are said to distance the reader from the biblical text in order to gain a more ‘objective’ perspective, Kierkegaard’s metaphorical layers mean to involve the reader in such a way as to focus one’s reading in terms of a ‘subjective’ appropriation of the text as ‘God’s Word’. Additionally, Kierkegaard here again makes allusion to his textile metaphor of the knot at the end of one’s interpretation: ‘If you do not read God’s Word in such a way that you consider that the least little bit you do understand instantly binds you to do accordingly, then you are not reading God’s Word.’142 The second series of For Self-Examination makes this explicit when he writes, ‘Only imitation can tie the knot at the end.’143

140 141 142 143

FSE, 32 / SKS 13, 60. FSE, 35 / SKS 13, 62. FSE, 29 / SKS 13, 57. JFY, 196 / SKS 16, 242.

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V. IMITATION, IMAGINATIVE FREEDOM AND PARADOXICAL FIXATION Kierkegaard develops the practical implications of appropriating God’s Word in the Bible through imitating God’s Word in Christ under such titles as Works of Love and Practice in Christianity. But even in the concise first section of For Self-Examination, it is clear that this hermeneutics of imitation – of doing the Word, and of viewing oneself in terms of the Word – stands as a significant exception to the tendency towards an ‘eclipse of biblical narrative’ in modern hermeneutics. As I mentioned in the first section, Frei never picks up this Kierkegaardian thread in his classic study of hermeneutics, but Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a series of comments penned while reading Kierkegaard in 1937, elucidates this realistic narratival view quite accurately: Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, rather: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative, don’t take the same attitude to it as you take to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it. – There is nothing paradoxical about that!144 Kierkegaard’s emphasis on Christian imitation draws upon the full resources of the biblical narrative (receiving back in faith what Johannes Climacus renounces in resignation). He does so not in order to make a historical argument for the reasonableness of subjective assent to ‘the absolute paradox’ but rather to contour Christian life in the light of the divine life incarnate. Still, if it is possible to read this feature of Kierkegaard’s hermeneutics in a straightforward manner – and by straightforward I mean that one can read it as though there is ‘nothing paradoxical’ about it – then one might wonder whether Kierkegaard’s emphasis on imitation has come to eclipse the other important features of what I have called his threefold biblical hermeneutics. That is, given the apparent prioritization of the hermeneutics of imitation, does Kierkegaard’s mature conception of biblical interpretation obscure the hermeneutics of imaginative freedom and the hermeneutics of paradoxical fixation that contour the development of his authorship through the Johannes Climacus works and even, to some extent, beyond? Comments in For Self-Examination make it clear that by 1851 Kierkegaard was wrestling intellectually with certain post-Reformation receptions of the Lutheran heritage and trying to understand how best to cast his own understanding of God’s Word relative to this tradition. In some ways, the view he articulates is quite Lutheran and, as we saw above, he goes so far as to say, ‘Lutheran doctrine is excellent, is the truth.’145 Kierkegaard appreciates Luther’s emphasis on the necessity of subjective appropriation of the Bible as God’s Word,146 and he additionally views the Reformation ad fontes dictum as a salutary corrective to the assumptions his contemporaries were making about modern intellectual progress: ‘Following the path of the commentators is often like traveling to London;

144

145 146

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and trans. Peter Winch (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 32. Emphasis original. FSE, 24 / SKS 13, 52. ‘Marvelous! The category “for you” (subjectivity, inwardness) with which Either/Or ended (only the truth that edifies is truth for you) is exactly Luther’s.’ KJN 4, p. 274 / SKS 20, NB3:61, pp. 274–5.

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true, the road leads to London, but if one wants to get there, he has to turn around.’147 Nonetheless, as Kierkegaard narrates the return trip ‘to the sources’ in his journal, he comes to identify the easy grace of modern Christendom increasingly with what he regards as Luther’s own insufficiently dialectical prioritization of grace; Luther’s view is not ‘what the New T[estament] understands by Xnty’ but, to the contrary, ‘clearly alters the Xnty of the New Testament’.148 Thus, instead of leading a return to New Testament Christianity, as Kierkegaard sees it, Luther ‘reduced the price of Xnty’.149 Kierkegaard attributes this deficiency in Luther’s biblical interpretation to an excessive emphasis on the epistles of Paul: Luther’s preaching of Christianity changes Christianity’s life-view and world view. He has one-sidedly appropriated ‘the apostle’ and goes so far – as he frequently does with this yardstick (turned the wrong way) – that he criticizes the gospels. If he does not find the apostle’s teaching in the gospel he concludes ergo this is no gospel. Luther does not seem to see that the apostle has already relaxed in relation to the gospels. And this wrong tack Luther made has been continued in Protestantism, which has made Luther absolute. When we found the apostle to be more rigorous (which he is) than Luther, we concluded: Here the apostle is wrong, this is not pure gospel. In this way we have systematically, step by step, cheated – that is, attempted to cheat God out of the gospel by turning the whole relationship around.150 What should we make of the way Kierkegaard explicates this ‘step by step’ reduction of the Gospel? He is certainly correct that Luther prioritizes Paul’s epistles (although not all of them) over the synoptic accounts of the Gospel, and Luther does so according to a criterion of Christological coherence that defines his conception of Christian faith (namely, the graceful saving action of God in Christ) and that ostensibly allows him to discern God’s Word in the words of Scripture. But does it seem odd that Kierkegaard suggests Luther prioritizes the epistles of Paul over ‘the Gospel’? Luther believes ‘the Gospel’ (God’s graceful action in Christ) is that to which Paul’s epistles witness. And the fact that alongside the Gospel according to John he ranks the Epistle to the Romans as ‘the Truest Gospel’151 in terms of Christological coherence shows that he thinks the Gospel should not be identified with the narrative genre of the first four ‘gospels’. Still more odd, Kierkegaard’s claim that ‘the apostle has already relaxed in relation to the gospels’ lands him in the awkward position of suggesting that somehow Paul (as well as Luther) has reduced the strenuous requirement of ‘the Xnty of the New Testament’, despite the fact that it is difficult to imagine what a phrase like ‘the Xnty of the New Testament’ can mean if Paul’s epistles are not partly constitutive of it.152 In fact, since scholars now date the composition of the Pauline epistles to an earlier period than any of the four canonical gospel accounts, we might wish to ask how Paul could have ‘already relaxed’ in relation to gospel accounts that were not yet in circulation? Read in this light, Kierkegaard’s association of Paul with a reduction of the Gospel seems to put him in a dubious position vis-à-vis the textual tradition to which he appeals. Of course, in order to make this last 147 148 149 150 151 152

JP 1:203, p. 83 / SKS 27, Papir 211, p. 158. KJN 9, pp. 482–3 / SKS 25, NB30:112, p. 476. KJN 9, p. 482 / SKS 25, NB30:112, p. 476. JP 3:2554, pp. 103–4 / SKS 26, NB32:67, p. 167. Luther, ‘Preface to the New Testament’, in Luther’s Works, vol. 35, 365. KJN 9, pp. 482–3 / SKS 25, NB30:112, pp. 476–7. See also JP 3:2921, p. 303 / SKS 27, Papir 560, p. 662: ‘As early as “the apostle” the scaling down process begins.’

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point one must be able to appeal to historical-critical ‘commentaries’ which, as we know, Kierkegaard was loath to do. Our willingness to do so, however, could help us avoid tying the knot in the wrong place. At this point, a sympathetic interpretation of Kierkegaard’s biblical hermeneutics will underscore the fact that Kierkegaard often advertises his work in terms of a ‘corrective’, so that when he makes an argument that seems so clearly extreme, one can defend him by saying that he viewed the claim as necessary in order to correct for an imbalance in the dialectic. If we read with a hermeneutics of suspicion, on the other hand, then it seems equally plausible to criticize Kierkegaard for the ‘loss of this dialectical dimension’, and to maintain that in his later rants about the ‘mess called Christendom’ he seems to develop a ‘mad’ theology.153 How do we adjudicate this matter? Bearing in mind Kierkegaard’s insight that how one interprets a text often discloses as much about the interpreter as it does about the text, I wish to suggest that we should read Kierkegaard sympathetically, but take what he says about biblical interpretation cum grano salis whenever it risks losing the dialectical dimension. Like the Bible, Kierkegaard’s authorship is plurivocal rather than univocal. And even if in his journal he risks eclipsing the lively interplay of his biblical hermeneutics by prioritizing works over grace – St James over St Paul – he nonetheless in his published work maintains that although it looks like ‘foolishness’ to all the world, the paradox of Christianity (and, indeed, of ‘true Lutheranism’) is that it entails ‘works and nevertheless grace’.154 Additionally, a reading that preserves the dialectical and plurivocal character of Kierkegaard’s biblical hermeneutics better accounts for the whole of his authorship when viewed synoptically. For, as I have sought to demonstrate in this chapter, Kierkegaard’s hermeneutics of imitation is contextualized both by a hermeneutics of imaginative freedom and a hermeneutics of paradoxical fixation. And it is possible to regard these elements as dialectically configured such that the imaginative freedom with which he reconfigures biblical texts generally is preserved when he fixes his attention on the incomprehensibility of ‘the absolute paradox’ in the Climacus works, and such that both the imaginative freedom of the first and the paradoxical fixation of the second are preserved when he emphasizes the existential imitation of Christ that makes the Gospel narrative real in the life of the follower. Having proposed a more sympathetic than suspicious reading, I should quickly add that I also think we should ignore his request when he writes, ‘do not busy yourself with criticizing the speaker or the speech’.155 If we look to his writings for any guidance in reading the Bible, we must also be entitled to say how his own views appear deficient or one-sided in important respects. In particular, how should we respond to Kierkegaard’s ‘principal rule’ of forswearing all biblical commentaries? In the context of an era dominated by the assumption that researchers could and should establish historical events objectively – wie es eigentlich gewesen [ist], to cite the well-known phrase of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) – Kierkegaard’s satire of the ‘crush of scholars and opinions’ with their ‘thirty thousand different ways’ of reading the Bible reads as a valuable caveat.156 Contemporary scholarship tends to operate on different assumptions, however, and few now would claim to be able to narrate history

153

154 155 156

Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 715. FSE, 17 / SKS 13, 46. FSE, 46 / SKS 13, 71–2. FSE, 25 / SKS 13, 53.

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objectively, as it actually happened. Today it is more common than not for biblical critics to acknowledge openly the (inter)subjective role of the interpreter in reading the Bible. But this acknowledgement does not yet fully meet Kierkegaard’s objection. Acknowledgement of the subjective dimension in reading the Bible is only one necessary condition for hearing God’s Word, as Kierkegaard sees it; it is certainly not a sufficient condition. What about Kierkegaard’s insistence that commentaries prevent one from being ‘alone with God’s Word’? In his journal he muses, ‘Suppose . . . that this letter from the lover had the odd feature that every single pers[on] was the loved one, what then? Is the intention now’, he asks, ‘that they should get together and confer with one another, even drag along a learned apparatus from countless generations?’157 Well, we can concede that much of the ‘learned apparatus’ through history and, indeed, much of what goes on in the present day at our conferences and perhaps even in our classrooms is not conducive to hearing God’s Word in the words of the Bible. As George Steiner aptly observes, ‘It is not, as Ecclesiastes would have it, that “of making many books there is no end”. It is that “of making books on books and books on those books there is no end”.’158 Kierkegaard would surely agree. But, we might ask, did he not consider his beloved Friday Communion services an opportunity to hear (and do) God’s Word together with others? And we might further ask, should we not regard his own discourses as commentaries of a sort, aimed to come alongside his reader in an encounter with the Bible as God’s Word? Certainly, Kierkegaard affirms an important spiritual discipline in encouraging the willingness to be alone with Scripture, but here again he risks losing the dialectical dimension if he so allegorizes the discipline that one must neglect ordinary existence and be ‘uninterruptedly alone with the letter’ to hear God’s Word.159 After all, as we saw above, part of Kierkegaard’s critique of allegory as the primary mode of interpretation is that the allegorical imagination obscures the actuality that Christ ‘was an individual hum[an] being, the apostle an individual hum[an] being, who in a prodigious effort dashed off a few words on a scrap of paper for a congregation’.160 Moreover, these scraps of paper often incorporated and commented upon earlier scraps of paper that were already regarded by the community as Scripture (thus giving the Bible its internally dialogical character) and were addressed to specific congregations who often read and interpreted these scraps of paper aloud and together (thus continuing within the early Christian community the Jewish practice of reading the Tanakh in which they would, in fact, sit and ‘confer with one another’161). And surely, if one of the distinctive features of this ‘love letter’ is that it is supposed to be addressed to every human being as ‘the beloved’, then we can hardly fault a recipient for wishing to discover how his neighbours are interpreting it as well; indeed, we might think him rather obtuse were he simply to ask to borrow a dictionary. Quibbling and cheeky remarks aside, however, it must be said that Kierkegaard’s interpretative practice corrects for many of the deficiencies of his explicit hermeneutical theory. His free and imaginative talent for enlivening biblical images across his pseudonymous and veronymous writings, together with his fixation on the New Testament paradox which human understanding ‘can never digest or convert into an ordinary syllogism’,162 serve

157 158 159 160 161 162

KJN 7, p. 450 / SKS 23, NB20:88, p. 442. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 48. FSE, 30 / SKS 13, 58. KJN 7, p. 150 / SKS 23, NB16:78, p. 148. KJN 7, p. 450 / SKS 23, NB20:88, p. 442. PC, 30 / SKS 12, 35.

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as a practical reminder of the open-endedness of interpretation, even when subjective commitment is secured through one’s decision to receive, respond and seek to embody the gift of God’s Word in Christ. And if when reading ‘in a scholarly way’ we wish to maintain that reading the Bible well is an ongoing process that includes engaging the dialogical tensions within the Bible with the helpful insights of other interpreters, allowing the ‘world of the text’ to unfold as fully as possible within the various constraints on interpretation, all in order to understand, reconstruct and reappropriate one’s own living identity vis-à-vis the world of the Bible, then Kierkegaard also adumbrates a corrective to any overreliance on such hermeneutical theory, for no interpretative method can ensure us that ‘in all this learned reading’ we are actually reading God’s Word.163 The transition by which the words of the Bible might become for us the Word of God remains ever a divine gift, as the Bible passage Kierkegaard calls ‘my first, my beloved, text,’164 makes plain, ‘Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above.’

FURTHER READING Barrett, Lee C., and Jon Stewart, eds. Kierkegaard and the Bible: Tome I: The Old Testament; Tome II: The New Testament. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 1. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Polk, Timothy Houston. The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading Kierkegaard by the Rule of Faith. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997. Pons, Jolita, Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. Pyper, Hugh S. The Joy of Kierkegaard: Essays on Kierkegaard as a Biblical Reader. London: Routledge, 2011. Rosas, L. Joseph, III. Scripture in the Thought of Søren Kierkegaard. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1994.

163 164

FSE, 29 / SKS 13, 56. KJN 8, p. 370 / SKS 24, NB24:74, p. 365.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Kierkegaard the Preacher AARON P. EDWARDS

INTRODUCTION: ‘KIERKEGAARD’ AND ‘PREACHING’? To many Christian preachers today, the word ‘Kierkegaard’ may seem to have very little relevance to the homiletical task. Not only would the technically correct pronunciation of this word in the pulpit seem to require specialist academic training, but to succeed in doing so would likely incur the accusations of being wildly pretentious. What is a preacher to do with Kierkegaard, and what has Kierkegaard to do with preaching? The very idea of a busy preacher using their precious sermon preparation time to sit down and actually read one of the many complicated books penned by this complicatedly named thinker would seem an absurd luxury. Yet Kierkegaard’s apparent irrelevance to the task of preaching might well be one of the strangest confusions in the history of modern theology. Despite appearances and despite caricatures, the average preacher may find that they have a lot more in common with Kierkegaard than they might think.1 There are hints of this preacherly preoccupation even in his pseudonymous writings, but especially in his signed authorship, and most certainly his journals. Indeed, as this chapter hopes to show, preaching was probably one of the topics which animated Kierkegaard more than anything else. Such is the breadth and depth of Kierkegaard’s homiletical vision and practice that this chapter cannot attempt to account for its entirety but will offer four key snapshots of the homiletical landscape of his life and thought. These are (1) Kierkegaard’s own observations from seeing, hearing and reading sermons, in Copenhagen’s pulpits; (2) his homiletical training at the Royal Pastoral Seminary, with early indications of his homiletical priorities; (3) his written discourses, including those he preached at the Communion service, with a discussion of his enigmatic sermon/discourse distinction; and (4) his most notable preaching appointment, at the Citadelskirke, an instance which provides an illuminating volume of reflection upon Kierkegaard’s reputation and reception as a preacher, and of his own complex understanding of his unique vocation. We will see that in spite of Kierkegaard’s own reticence to fully embrace it, preaching remained something of an inescapable calling for him, the fruit of which continues to challenge the contemporary homiletical imagination.

1

For a contemporary attempt at ‘Kierkegaardian preaching’, see Ronald F. Marshall, Kierkegaard for the Church: Essays and Sermons (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013), 247–87.

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I. UNDER THE COPENHAGEN PULPIT Søren Kierkegaard lived during what has been called the ‘golden age’ of Danish Christendom. The nation’s capital, Copenhagen, was bustling with fervent ecclesial activity, majestic churches and – above all – dozens and dozens of sermons preached every week which shaped and dominated the socio-religious imagination of the day. Kierkegaard was no stranger to this intensely sermonic environment. Søltoft notes that ‘Kierkegaard had a lively interest in the sermons of his time’ and was ‘an avid reader of the edifying literature of his day; moreover, in his library he had a vast collection of sermons.’2 His father read sermons to him from a young age, a habit which he kept up and recommended to others his entire life, and regularly attended the pulpits of various churches across the city. As Walter Lowrie aptly put it, Kierkegaard was quite simply ‘a constant hearer of sermons’.3 Not only did he hear them but he analysed and dissected them, constantly sifting them for what they might (or might not) possess of worth to the transmission and enactment of the Christian life. As Holmer notes, ‘His many personal papers record an almost continuous give-and-take with sundry sermons. He was a sharply critical, yet worshipful listener.’4 Burgess even goes as far as to say that ‘Kierkegaard occupies a nearly unique place among those who have thought about the Christian sermon.’5 Indeed, for all Kierkegaard’s views on a panoply of religious and theological subjects, his views on sermons and preaching were undoubtedly among his most animated and perceptive, forged as they were in the mid-nineteenth-century Christendom climate of Copenhagen. Andrew Hamilton, the British Evangelical who published a travelogue of his 1847 visit to Copenhagen, which included the first Anglophone reference to Kierkegaard, noted, ‘The Metropolis is not ill-provided with faithful preachers,’ also adding, ‘There are still churches in the metropolis in which nothing but the driest and deadliest morality is preached in place of the Gospel.’6 One might think this latter observation could have chimed nicely with Kierkegaard’s own critiques of preaching. However, any possible affinity would soon vanish upon reading Hamilton’s curiously positive observation of the intellectual and cultural distance between the clergy and the congregation.7 Indeed, the bourgeois ministerial atmosphere which Kierkegaard often found so repulsive was seen in an altogether radiant light by Hamilton, particularly in his assessment of the grand Christiansborg pulpit frequented by both J. P. Mynster and H. L. Martensen: The Palace Church is the most fashionable place of worship in Copenhagen; and it is thus a peculiarly happy circumstance that its preachers should be men of such influence and power. The large building is always full and usually crowded. The audience is the highest in rank and importance, many of whom, go, doubtless, for fashion’s sake, whilst the rest of the church is filled by a more miscellaneous throng. In every way

2

3 4

5

6 7

Pia Søltoft, ‘The Power of Eloquence: On the Relation between Ethics and Rhetoric in Preaching’, in Søren Kierkegaard and the Word(s): Essays on Hermeneutics and Communication, ed. Paul Houe and Gordon D. Marino (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 2003), 240–7 [242]. Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, vol. 1 (New York: Harper Torchbooks: 1962), 275. Paul L. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, ed. David J. Gouwens and Lee C. Barrett III (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), 261. Andrew J. Burgess, ‘Kierkegaard on Homiletics and the Genre of the Sermon’, Journal of Communication and Religion 17, no. 2 (September 1994): 17–31 [29]. Andrew Hamilton, Sixteen Months in the Danish Isles, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), 179–80. Ibid., 179.

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it is a matter of high moment that, just in this church, such splendid displays of the Christian Truth should be never-failing.8 Hamilton’s unambiguously glowing account of clerical elitism sounds strange to anyone familiar with Kierkegaard’s acerbic attacks on Copenhagen’s bourgeois ecclesial culture. In a journal draft written not long after this time, Kierkegaard noted the hypocritical absurdity of Martensen’s preaching for almost precisely the same reasons as those for which Hamilton had praised it: In the splendid cathedral a handsome Royal Chaplain, the cultured public’s chosen one, appears before a select constituency of the select, and preaches movingly – I say ‘movingly,’ [rørt] I do not say ‘dryly’ [tørt] – no, he preaches movingly on the apostle’s words: God has chosen the poor and despised of the world – and no one laughs!9 Such a comment (including the satirical wordplay) exemplifies Kierkegaard’s sense of angst as he sat under the Copenhagen pulpit. Where Hamilton could laud the ‘splendid displays of the Christian Truth’ in the Palace Church, for Kierkegaard such displays were the very evidence of the church’s departure from the truth.10 This ironical pulpit situation, where speakers embodied the very opposite of what the Christian message seemed to entail, gave Kierkegaard an ever-present and visible image for everything he felt was wrong with Danish Christendom. Notably, Martensen’s own elitist rationale shows that Kierkegaard’s critique was no superficial exaggeration: ‘it is of great importance that the cultivated people are preached to, and it would be one of the saddest things if the cultivated remained outside the Church . . . [T]he preacher who can seize hold of the cultivated seizes hold of the most important part of society, which can influence the rest.’11 Kierkegaard saw through this apparent ‘mission strategy’ as nothing more than a convenient theological justification for the status quo (especially dubious in Copenhagen of all places, whose congregations could hardly be said to be short on ‘cultivated’ people). This bore itself out in sermons which sought to elaborately avoid the imperatives in Scripture which might destabilize the ecclesial social order. In an 1849 journal entry entitled ‘An example of how not to preach, yes, of how it is far better to be silent and merely read Scripture aloud’, Kierkegaard reports, ‘Martensen preaches on the self-chosen text: Let the dead bury their dead. And what does he do? Presto! He gets involved in the observation that whole epochs and generations simply buried their dead, spiritually speaking. Well, thanks for that . . . Where does that leave me, the single individual with my miniscule act [?]’12 Kierkegaard’s frustrated experiences as a listener of such ideological sermon-making formed the seedbed for his increasingly vocal attacks upon the established clergy in the 1850s, not least in the ways in which socio-economic convenience directly affected the culture in which preaching occurred.13

8 9 10

11

12 13

Ibid., 180. JP 6:6787, p. 430 / SKS 27, Papir 397, p. 476. It was Martensen’s sermon following Mynster’s death, in which he had referred to Mynster as a ‘witness to the truth’, that essentially catalysed Kierkegaard’s public attack on the church in 1854. See TM, 5–8. H. L. Martensen, quoted in Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 192. JP 6:6552, p. 262 / SKS 22, NB14:86, p. 394. See Eliseo Pérez–Álvarez, A Vexing Gadfly: The Late Kierkegaard on Economic Matters (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2011), 75–84.

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Kierkegaard’s reception of Martensen’s mentor, Bishop Mynster, was central to this (anti-)homiletical imagination. Despite maintaining a lifelong and somewhat complex respect for Mynster,14 and endeavouring ‘to hear Mynster’s sermons wherever possible,’15 Mynster’s preaching came in for considerable and sustained rebuke. This was perhaps because Kierkegaard saw him as the symbol of the established church, and thus, the least likely person to initiate preaching that was in any way outside-the-box; or, indeed, outside-the-church: ‘It would be impossible, yes, most impossible of all, for Mynster to preach in the public square. And yet preaching in churches has practically become paganism and theatricality.’16 The social and architectural opulence of Christendom perpetuated the impossibility of the Gospel penetrating the secular worldliness of the public sphere. Thus, faith remained something one could admire at a distance aesthetically rather than grasp for oneself existentially.17 This led Kierkegaard to muse upon the possibility of street preaching as a paradoxically ‘appropriate’ method of Christian proclamation in Christendom.18 This is because it would require the communicator to abandon the trappings of social and ecclesiastical status, thus more accurately communicating the implications of the Gospel in actuality.19 In almost direct contrast to Kierkegaard’s concerns for the inappropriateness of preaching in magnificent church buildings, Mynster was known in his sermons to give powerful arguments for the absolute necessity of church buildings to the cause of the Gospel.20 In Mynster’s Christendom, preaching was unthinkable without the visible and orderly grandeur of ecclesial architecture as a material and societal demonstration of the kingdom. For Kierkegaard, at his most polemically animated, Christian preaching may only be truly possible without such buildings, whereby the existential essence of Christian proclamation would no longer be obscured.21 The problem with Mynster’s sermons was not only that they explicitly perpetuated the structures and systems of Christendom but that they used aesthetical rhetoric as a shield against the existential actualization of the message: ‘Today [19 January 1851] Mynster preached about the beauty of the Christian life – and very beautifully. But to penetrate, give impetus to action, etc. – no, that is foreign to Mynster’s nature as he is now. Instead of Christian restlessness, always artistic serenity.’22 For Kierkegaard, Mynster’s serene and poetic tranquillity in both the form and content of his preaching was akin to the false prophet’s exclamation of ‘peace, peace!’ when there is no peace (Jer. 6.14).

14

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16 17

18 19

20 21

22

This complexity is bound up with Kierkegaard’s loyalty to his father, who first introduced him to Mynster’s sermons as a child; Kierkegaard continued to read the sermons for edification and appeared to recommend the sermons to all his readers (though it could be said this recommendation contained more than a hint of indirection). See JP 6:6749, p. 400 / SKP X 6 B 173. Anders Holm, ‘Kierkegaard and the Church’, in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 112–28 [114]. JP 6:6150, p. 6 / SKS 20, NB5:37, p. 385. See Kierkegaard’s memorable remarks on the preachers who merely ‘make some observations’, losing both the congregation and their own humanity in the process. PC, 236. JP 6:6957, p. 562 / SKP XI 3 B 120. See Aaron Edwards, ‘Kierkegaard as Socratic Street Preacher?: Reimagining the Dialectic of Direct and Indirect Communication for Christian Proclamation’, Harvard Theological Review 110, no. 2 (April 2017): 280–300. See George Pattison, Poor Paris!: Kierkegaard’s Critique of the Spectacular City (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 112. ‘Within an established order of public officials and bread-and-butter representatives, preaching in a magnificent church is, from a Christian point of view, actually nonsense; it becomes sheer sense-illusion.’ JP 3:3489, p. 594 / SKS 22, NB13:82, pp. 323–4. JP 6:6717, p. 371 / SKS 24, NB22:157, p. 189.

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Kierkegaard, of course, was by no means against using poetical rhetoric in sermons. One of his favourite preachers in church history was the great orator, John Chrysostom, whom Kierkegaard enjoyed contrasting with Mynster: ‘Mynster has made a religious speaker into an artistic performance and studiously guards against becoming personally involved. Right there is the mistake. Chrysostom is also very eloquent – but he gesticulates with his whole life. He initiates some action in public life – and the next Sunday preaches about it. He uses the pulpit for action.’23 Here we see the crux of Kierkegaard’s homiletical critique. For the preaching to be received as genuinely Christian, it must embody its truthfulness in the location of the sermon, the language of the sermon and – most importantly – in the life of the preacher. For Kierkegaard, this is the only way sermons can become agents of existential – and even societal – transformation. Speaking of Mynster’s and J. H. V. Paulli’s preaching, he again critiques their aesthetic guise, warning against the longer-term implications: ‘in the course of time this lyric poetry once a week will have a weaker and weaker influence compared to the corresponding weeks and weeks of the secular mentality.’24 It is evident that Kierkegaard’s burden for preaching in his city was, like Chrysostom’s, that it challenge and guard against the pervasive effects of societal worldliness.25 His realization that the church was itself the greatest purveyor of this ‘secular mentality’26 no doubt hastened his eventual decision to stop hearing live sermons altogether when he stopped attending church in protest. There were, of course, more positive reflections on some of the sermons Kierkegaard heard. On once hearing a theological graduate, Clemmensen, he noted: ‘It was a simple sermon, but the kind I like.’27 By this he meant that the sermon’s poeticality led to the personal exhortation of the sermon, unlike those of Mynster, Martensen and Paulli. Another preacher, C. H. Visby, may at one time have been Kierkegaard’s favourite preacher in Copenhagen, perhaps partially because he had been a prison chaplain and thus his ministerial concerns differed significantly from the ‘court preachers’. Kierkegaard reports of one sermon that Visby ‘knew how to use the gospel for the day in an illuminating way’, yet later adding ‘he could have done it better’;28 of another he notes that in an ‘otherwise really muddled funeral-pie’ of a sermon, Visby had ‘made a point which deserves attention.’29 From Kierkegaard’s acerbic homiletical pen, such caveated approval counts as high praise indeed! What is clear is that Kierkegaard saw something in Visby’s sermons that seemed slightly closer to the livingness of the proclaimed Word,30 especially via the existential spontaneity of the sermon event: When one of the other pastors has written his sermon counting on sunshine, he will talk about sunshine, even if it pours rain, but when Visby preaches, and a ray of sunshine comes into the church, he grasps that ray and speaks about it at such length, and 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

JP 6:6716, pp. 370–1 / SKS 24, NB22:155, p. 187. JP 6:6802, p. 445 / SKS 25, NB26:8, p. 17. See Aideen Hartney, John Chrysostom and the Transformation of the City (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). Criticizing one of Paulli’s sermons, Kierkegaard also implicates the hearing congregations: ‘You with your secularized lives are better served with plump career-preachers who are Knights of the Danish Order.’ JP 3:3522, p. 608 / SKS 24, NB24:81, p. 370. JP 6:6612, p. 311 / SKS 23, NB17:99, p. 239. JP 3:3495, pp. 595–6 / SKS 23, NB15:34, p. 27. JP 4:4639, p. 388 / SKS 22, NB12:183, p. 255. This is not to be confused with N. F. S. Grundtvig’s concept of the ‘living word’, which denoted not written Scripture but the message of the Apostles’ Creed, kept alive through the ongoing life of the local church.

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so beautifully and edifyingly, that you leave with a ray of sunshine in your heart. He is the only improviser of them all.31 This not only reflects Kierkegaard’s own thoughts on preaching and extemporaneity32 but also complements his frequent stress upon the earnest exegesis of the biblical text. In the sermon, Scripture must come alive for the hearer in a uniquely personal way, and must therefore be allowed to speak its truth through the sermon rather than be squeezed into elaborate dogmatic straitjackets which preclude the possibility of challenge or imitation. As Holm notes, Kierkegaard liked ‘sermons which had not been finished at the desk; sermons that adapted to the demands of the situation.’33 Indeed, we can see in Kierkegaard’s love of sermonic spontaneity a connection with his musings on preaching on the street in the midst of ‘actuality’, where the unexpected might occur.34 In most official churches, however – bar the odd ray of sunshine – preaching had the air of incessant inevitability. Sermons were mere envoys which acted to further insure the bourgeois system, ideologically closed to the transformational force of the Gospel. It was for this that Kierkegaard could not forgive the preachers of Christendom. The famously influential anti-establishment preacher, N. F. S. Grundtvig – of whose Vartou Church Andrew Hamilton had said it was ‘a treat to hear a sermon there’35 – might have seemed another preacher in whom Kierkegaard could find kinship. However, Kierkegaard had significant problems not only with the Grundtvigian movement as an entity, but particularly with the content of Grundtvig’s preaching,36 which he deemed to be essentially sub-Christian and unorthodox.37 Grundtvig’s critique of the church professed that the Word of God was absent and must be located in the people rather than the establishment. In contrast, Kierkegaard, no doubt following Luther, maintained that the Word was still present in the church because it stood separate from it in Scripture – the problem was that it lacked existential efficacy and application: Grundtvig stepped into the world with his trial sermon: Why has God’s Word departed from God’s house. I could never make such a remark. I would have to say: Why has power departed from the proclamation of God’s Word. For I do believe that it is still God’s Word which is heard round about the country – the trouble is that we simply do not act according to it.38 Kierkegaard’s disagreement with Grundtvig is particularly illuminating because it forces Kierkegaard to show his colours in a way he might not have done by only critiquing the Mynsters and Martensens of the establishment. No doubt the Christendom pulpit

31

32 33 34

35 36 37

38

Kierkegaard, quoted in Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 328–9. See JP 6:6769, pp. 415–16 / SKS 24, NB24:74, pp. 365–7. Holm, ‘Kierkegaard and the Church’, 115. Kierkegaard held the notion of spontaneity in tension, however, given the ways it might be abused by the revivalist preacher motivated by congregational response and statistics: ‘Spontaneous enthusiasm in preaching Christianity is related to winning everybody, if possible . . . but watch out lest man’s instinctive cunning be knavishly implicit in this eulogizing . . . Maybe the preacher becomes fascinated at the sight of all the Christians he is winning – this is dangerous to ideality.’ JP 3:2998, p. 350 / SKS 26, NB34:18, p. 330. Extemporaneity was welcomed by Kierkegaard, but only if it did not override the existential. Hamilton, Sixteen Months in the Danish Isles, 182–3. Holm, ‘Kierkegaard and the Church’, 116–20. This was especially ironic given that Grundtvig’s central leitmotiv was the unbroken communion of the church across the ages. JP 6:6733, p. 384 / SKS 24, NB23:54, p. 235.

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was his more important (and urgent) target of critique, but we would be unlikely to see Kierkegaard positively affirming and defending the concept of ‘the proclamation of God’s Word’ so unambiguously when critiquing those on his theo-political ‘right’. Mynster et al might also easily affirm that ‘it is still God’s Word which is heard round about the country’; and yet they would use such a maxim to rationalize the avoidance of the Word’s appropriation in themselves or their hearers. Kierkegaard is, of course, a master at emphasizing and de-emphasizing his views according to his different contexts and audiences. But even at his most antagonistic, he still shows that his critique is not merely deconstructive and dismissive of preaching, but is borne from the conviction that preaching held such a high place in his thought and life. Kierkegaard did have a genuine longing to hear faithfully embodied Gospel proclamation under the Copenhagen pulpit. He did not despise preaching, as might be supposed by his anticlerical rhetoric, but genuinely listened with expectation that he might hear – and indeed, see – the Word made flesh in both the sermon and the preacher. Although Kierkegaard spent a great deal of time as a frustrated listener, his reflective experience helped to shape his own homiletical imagination and to clarify what he felt was of first importance in Christian proclamation, and what was deeply lacking in the contemporary pulpits of his day.39 In turn, this also crystallized his own conception and practice of preaching, even in the complex way he conceived of his role as a preacher. Yet it was a role for which he had been, oddly enough, ‘officially’ trained.

II. AT THE PASTORAL SEMINARY On Tuesday, 17 November 1840, a 27-year-old Kierkegaard, fresh from his graduation in July of the same year, enrolled as a newcomer for the 1840/1 winter semester at Copenhagen’s Royal Pastoral Seminary. The postgraduate homiletics class usually convened from TuesdayThursday each week. It is not clear precisely what kind of formal homiletical principles the candidates were taught, but it is evident that a key aspect of the training involved the delivery and critique of sermons, often in minute detail. This included attention to the sermon’s tone, delivery, exegesis, structural outline, as well as close analysis of individual phrases, and even – in many cases – evaluations of the preacher’s opening and closing prayers. In spite of such close homiletical evaluation it is important to note that, unlike many homiletical classes, these were not actually ‘practice’ sermons as such. Some were preached to smaller congregations midweek, but many were preached on regular Sundays in significant churches in the city, such as Holmens Church, Trinitatis Church and Vartou Church. From the Pastoral Seminary’s records we get a flavour of the kind of preacher and listener Kierkegaard was, as well as some early indications of what he would later come to emphasize about preaching in his later writings, particularly his discourses. On 1 December 1840, critiquing a sermon by one fellow student, Johan Wittrock, Kierkegaard was keen to point out the necessary correlation between the cadence of the sermon and that of the biblical text: ‘Mr. Kierkegaard read his criticism aloud, in which, from the point of view of a listener, he had found himself unable to discern that rhythm in the sermon that was undeniably contained in the text.’40 The account prefigures not only

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For an illuminating correlative study on Kierkegaard’s (dis)connection to Mynsterian and Grundtvigian approaches to preaching, see George Pattison, ‘Proclaiming the Word’, in Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century: The Paradox and the ‘Point of Contact’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). LD, 18.

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Kierkegaard’s prefaces to his many published discourses (where he always encourages the reader to ‘read aloud’) but also showcases his attentiveness to the rhetoric of Scripture in the discourses, whereby he will often spend such a long time circumventing the implications of a single word or phrase, and then return again to the flow and ‘rhythm’ of the text’s central theme. (Poor Wittrock then had to listen to Kierkegaard’s own detailed suggestion for how Wittrock ought to have structured it.) Kierkegaard’s own turn to be grilled came after the Christmas holidays, at noon on Tuesday 12 January 1841. Here, at Holmens Church, he preached his first ever sermon, taking Phil. 1.19-25 as his text. It was described by his fellow students, R. T. Fenger and I. H. Linnemann, as having been ‘very well memorized’ and ‘written with great thought and sharp logic’, yet it was seen to be ‘far too exalted in tone for the average person’.41 One reads these critiques with a wry smile when imagining how Kierkegaard might have received them, and indeed when one considers the complex reception of his entire authorship, which was equally impenetrable for much of the Copenhagen public.42 Fenger and Linnemann went on to suggest that the density and richness of thought rendered the sermon ‘relatively incomprehensible’, at which point Kierkegaard then evidently took to defending himself (unsurprisingly) on the grounds that he had not deviated from the text.43 His respondents then replied that he had perhaps sought to say too much, exhausting the text’s entirety rather than focusing on one key aspect.44 Again, one wonders what effect this critique may have had on his later discourses, where we do see something of this zoning-in method in full effect, continually oscillating around a single scriptural phrase or idea.45 Responding to the sermon of another student, T. Thomsen (9 March 1841), a debate ensued within the class on the connection between Thomsen’s public prayer and the sermon’s content. Kierkegaard, of course, happily enters the fray: ‘Mr. Kierkegaard further documented his opinion that there was no relationship between the prayer and the sermon’ because it was too general and did not correlate specifically enough with the phrases of the text.46 After various back-and-forth discussion from others, Kierkegaard chimes in yet again: ‘Kierkegaard thought that one ought to have the whole sermon in mind as one writes the prayer.’47 He continually wants to make a point of underlining the importance of the sermon/prayer connection. Even at this early stage in his homiletical development, Kierkegaard’s gravitation to the personal impact of the biblical text in preaching is clear. We might even say that, for Kierkegaard, the sermonic prayer becomes the moment of the text’s spiritual actualization in the preacher. Kierkegaard clearly enjoyed his time at the Pastoral Seminary. Notably, he is one of the students listed as ‘wishing to continue from the 1840/41 winter semester’.48 On finally completing the course on 24 February 1844, Kierkegaard received the grade of laudabalis (praiseworthy) for his graduation sermon (one of his examiners was, of all people, J. H.

41 42

43 44 45

46 47 48

LD, 19. Sometimes, of course, this was deliberate on Kierkegaard’s part – though it would certainly not have been intended for his edifying discourses. LD, 19. LD, 19. Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling also exemplifies this, as a multifaceted interpretative work on a single biblical story: Abraham and Isaac. LD, 21. LD, 21. LD, 17.

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V. Paulli – Mynster’s son-in-law!).49 This grade was the equivalent of a ‘high merit’ in modern postgraduate terms, and just below the distinction-level haud laudabalis (praiseworthy before others). Kierkegaard the emerging preacher was much like Kierkegaard the emerging author: linguistically brilliant, devotionally edifying, but – at times – maddeningly incomprehensible. Overall, although we do not have comprehensive details of Kierkegaard’s homiletical training, we do get an embryonic sense of his methodological emphases, his preaching practice and an insight into the kinds of comments which may have shaped his thinking along the way. Another particularly illuminating piece of feedback Kierkegaard received on his Holmens Church sermon was that it was too suggestive and didactic (i.e. non-authoritative). The student noted that the sermon missed ‘that fresh vitality’ needed ‘in order for it truly to summon mankind from the world to God.’50 This is fascinating in light of Kierkegaard’s later assessments of other preachers, such as Mynster (negatively) or Visby (positively), where it is clear that he too sees the need for both vitality and radicality in preaching to transport hearers from their secular mentality to heed God’s call. Knowing that Kierkegaard received such theologically specific feedback may even shed light on the roots of his famously puzzling distinction between sermons and discourses, where he says that sermons require authority and must not deal with doubt. One wonders, then, would he have looked back on his seminary sermons as ‘discourses’ because of their suggestiveness? It perhaps more likely points to the possibility of interpreting the distinction more complexly, as will be seen.

III. TO DISCOURSE OR TO SERMONIZE? Having completed his seminary training, Kierkegaard knew he always had the option, at some point, of entering the pastorate. He oscillated between the call to serve God through writing his authorship and the call to serve God through full-time ministry.51 His agonizing over this decision lasted many years and was inextricably bound up with the complexity of his thinking around the situation of his former fiancée, Regine Olsen, whose engagement he had broken and hence had endeavoured to maintain her honour by deliberately not taking a respectable place in society. His desire to escape the clamour of Copenhagen to a quiet rural parish was strong, but so was his awareness of the temptation of joining the established order, with all its comforts – even if he thought he could be of some use ‘on the inside’. Perhaps even more bizarrely, for a number of years he also entertained the possibility of an appointment as a tutor at the Pastoral Seminary.52 As Burgess remarks, ‘Kierkegaard might have made a brilliant if eccentric professor of preaching.’53 Indeed, his unfinished (though rigorously planned) lectures on communication54 were undoubtedly written with this kind of post in mind. After a number of years he decided he would swallow his pride and ask Bishop Mynster about the possibility directly.55 Seemingly, Mynster was 49 50 51

52 53 54 55

LD, 26. LD, 20. See B. E. Benktson, ‘The Ministry ’, in Theological Concepts in Kierkegaard, ed. Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 5 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Boghandel, 1980), 218–27 [224]. JP 6:6749, p. 399 / SKP X 6 B 173. Burgess, ‘Kierkegaard on Homiletics’, 17. See JP 1:649–57, pp. 267–308 / SKS 27, Papir 364–71, pp. 389–430. JP 6:6370, p. 131 / SKS 25, NB29:116, p. 377.

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not entirely against the idea but was also – quite understandably – cautious. Remarkably, however, in the end Mynster seems to have suggested that Kierkegaard establish his own homiletical seminary instead!56 Whether this was merely a ploy to get Kierkegaard out of Copenhagen we cannot know. Mynster owned and read the majority of Kierkegaard’s published works and did not treat him insignificantly, but one gets the sense he could never fully trust the Melancholy Dane either with a seminary post or a pastorate. Kierkegaard knew this well, in spite of his disappointment at Mynster’s reluctance to pursue the idea any further. Given this ongoing struggle over his vocation,57 Kierkegaard continued to write what he called ‘discourses’, published in small series often on the same day as a pseudonymous work in his authorship. These discourses were always signed in his own name, often began and ended with a prayer, and almost always contained a sustained reflection (or exposition) of a biblical text or theme.58 As has been noted, Kierkegaard expressly stated that they were not sermons because he did not have the authority to preach them.59 However, their relationship to sermons is complexified by the fact that most of them take the ‘form’ of a sermon,60 and indeed some were even based on sermon outlines from his time at the Pastoral Seminary. It is also very clear that Kierkegaard’s ambivalence over his precise calling was tangentially related to his continual production of discourses, of which six sets had already been published by August 1844. This practice kept the possibility of preaching alive for him not only in himself but also in the sight of others. This was especially important alongside the more esoteric and eccentric works he was writing during the first phase of the authorship. Had Kierkegaard eventually become a pastor, he almost certainly would have used his discourses in the pulpit. Hannay notes, cynically though not without some truth, ‘At some point he would be looking for a job. The discourses helped him to keep that option open.’61 But if the discourses might also have functioned as sermons, what can this mean for Kierkegaard’s curious disavowal of the sermonic form? Many have noticed that all may not be what it seems with Kierkegaard’s distinction.62 We have seen how Kierkegaard critiqued the authority of the preachers of Christendom and questioned the use of the imperative command (‘you must’) in sermons because ‘there is a unique difficulty regarding the extent to which one man has the right to speak this way to another’, regardless of whether or not they have ‘authority’ from their ordination.63 This elucidates that in saying he has ‘no authority to preach’ Kierkegaard is not simply referring to his lack of ordination, as is often supposed.64 He means something 56 57

58

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JP 6:6777, p. 421 / SKS 24, NB24:121, p. 397. ‘In spite of all his misgivings, SK knew that he had the “vocatio interna”; he waited in vain for the “vocatio externa.” To be a “verbi divini minister” is what SK feels called to be and what he reaches towards, and – in eager pursuit of his ideals – he overreaches himself.’ Benktson, ‘The Ministry’, 225. Kierkegaard also distinguished different categories within the discourse genre, such as ‘occasional’, ‘imagined’, ‘upbuilding’, ‘Christian’, ‘confessional’, ‘delivered’ and so on. But many of them still begin with a prayer and a scriptural passage which is not merely epigraphic but intended to be the main driver for the content of the discourse. See, for example, EUD, 5, 53, 107, 179, 201, 295. See George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology (London: Routledge, 2002), 13. Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 206. See Marshall, Kierkegaard for the Church, 252; George Pattison, ‘ “Who” is the Discourse?: A Study in Kierkegaard’s Religious Literature’, Kierkegaardiana 16 (1993): 28–45 [29]. JP 6:6670, pp. 345–6 / SKS 23, NB20:143, p. 468. Pattison notes the paradoxical reality that Kierkegaard refers to the discourses as ‘not sermons’ on the grounds that he had not been given ‘official’ authority by the church to preach them, while Mynster himself (the highest

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more akin to the authority of existential appropriation,65 the kind of authority possessed by an apostle,66 which is ultimately to say, the kind of authority possessed by the Word alone. This is an ongoing theme in his authorship, and certainly feeds into his rationale for what he may or may not have been ‘doing’ in his discourses vis-à-vis ‘authority’.67 For one thing, the terms ‘sermon’ and ‘discourse’ are sometimes used interchangeably. His Friday communion discourses are a well-known genre of his writing and he refers to them as the ‘gathering place’ for his entire authorship,68 yet in his journal he also refers to them as sermons: ‘The Friday sermon I gave today was one I had previously worked out in its essential features.’69 This shows not only the terminological variation but also the use of previous sermon outlines (probably from the Pastoral Seminary years) as the basis for the communion ‘discourses’. Why, then, were the communion ‘sermons’ not classed as preaching? The communion discourse on Jn 10.27, delivered in Vor Frue Kirke on 27 August 1847, is a good example of a discourse which discusses this issue explicitly within the text itself. It rewards a closer examination as we consider the possible nuance within Kierkegaard’s sermon/discourse distinction. One reason Kierkegaard seemed to prefer the Friday communion discourses to Sunday sermons was precisely because this was not the so-called ‘holy day’. Rather, it was a smaller gathering of those faithful few who had chosen, individually, to come to church in the middle of the working week, chiming in with Kierkegaard’s aforementioned comment on the appeal of street preaching ‘in the middle of ordinary everyday life’. This was in stark contrast to the Copenhageners who only attended out of social compulsion. He speaks of this at the outset of the discourse: ‘Today is not a holy day; today everyone goes routinely to his fields, to his business, to his work; only those few individuals came to the Lord’s house today.’70 The very fact that the Friday passersby would not know you were going to church that day particularly appealed to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on inwardness: ‘Openly before everyone’s eyes, and yet secretly, the single individual came to church today . . . It did not occur to any passerby that you were going to God’s house’.71 The real value here for Kierkegaard is the tangible sense of ecclesial reality existing – almost clandestinely – under the nose of secular existence: ‘The noise of the daily activity of life out there sounds almost audibly within this vaulted space, where this sacred stillness is therefore even all the greater.’72 Kierkegaard clearly likes this contrast. Unlike Sundays – where all is quiet and apparently (but not actually) holy – the Friday Communion services were a kind of spiritual oasis in the midst of the frenetic city: ‘The stillness that public authority can command civilly is nevertheless not godly stillness, but this stillness, whilst the world makes noise,

65

66 67

68 69 70 71 72

authority in the Danish Church) actually did consider them to be sermons. Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, 13, cf. Kts [J. P. Mynster], ‘Kirkelig Polemik’, Intelligensblade 41–2 (1844): 111–13 [111]. As Snowden asserts, ‘pastoral authority does not rest upon the pastoral office but on personal sanctity which qualifies one to enter the office.’ Barry L. Snowden, ‘By What Authority?: Kierkegaard on Pastoral Authority and Authenticity ’, Quarterly Review (Winter 1985): 43–57 [54]. See BA, 177–8. Some prefaces speak of ‘authority’ in relation to the actual gathering, as though the fact the discourse is heard ‘live’ is what gives it the authority. See UDVS, 5. This is not always emphasized but again adds another layer of complexity to what Kierkegaard is attempting to say with the sermon/discourse distinction. WA, 165. JP 6:6249, p. 54 / SKS 21, NB7:16, p. 84. CD, 269. CD, 269. CD, 270.

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is godly stillness.’73 Such a comment becomes particularly intriguing in light of the ‘authority’ question. Is he saying, perhaps, that there is an authority to this service, and does it have anything to do with the ‘non-sermonic’ words he is speaking there and then? Apparently not. Kierkegaard is adamant to stress that although the hearers have come ‘to hear [God’s] voice’, this does not arrive through the voice of the preacher.74 The very fact they have come only to hear God’s voice is precisely why what he is doing is not preaching: ‘Today no sermon is preached. A confessional address is not a sermon; it does not want to instruct you or impress upon you the old familiar doctrines; it only wants to have you pause on the way to the Communion table so that through the speaker’s voice you yourself confess privately and secretly before God.’75 This would seem to link the confessional address closer to prayer than preaching, even though that would seem patently not to be the case. On yet another level, we might wonder, does Kierkegaard simply have a deficiently narrow understanding of a sermon’s capability?76 Is his idea of a sermon exclusively cognitive, based upon the sermons he had grown up hearing and seeing? It is true that preaching is so often imagined through the lenses of one’s ecclesial traditions, but judging on how Kierkegaard critiqued his fellow Copenhagen preachers, his theology of the sermon is surely anything but ‘cognitocentric’. Certainly it is the case that a full theology of preaching ought to include within the sermon precisely what Kierkegaard identifies here as the work of a ‘confessional address’. And yet, explicit though his caveat is, further questions emerge that make us wonder whether this is what Lowrie meant when he suspected Kierkegaard of both modesty and irony by his sermon/discourse distinction.77 Is this itself an indirect communication? Surely it is possible to hear God in and through the exposition of the spoken text?78 Surely this is the very reason a prayer for invocation preceded the reading of the text? And yet, on the surface he remains adamant, repeating again: ‘Today no sermon is preached.’79

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CD, 270. An 1849 journal entry perhaps sheds some light on what he may be getting at here: The secular mind asks, ‘Who preached today?’ In a godly spirit one would not ask about such things. For here, in God’s house, whether the pastor preaches or the sexton, the most renowned pastor or the leastknown student, there is always One who preaches, always one and the same–God in heaven. That God is present, this is the sermon; and that you are before God, this is the content of the sermon. JP 1:591, p. 240 / SKS 21, NB10:190, p. 356.

75 76

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79

Clearly, Kierkegaard’s point is not to empty the sermon of its theological power, but to remove the emphasis upon the aesthetic fripperies with which congregants were usually more enamoured. For Kierkegaard, the sermon is not a time for observing rhetoric; the sermon is where God speaks. This is probably another reason he feels unable to claim the category of ‘sermon’ for his own discourses. CD, 270–1. On the contrary, Burgess notes that, ‘Kierkegaard’s definition of the genre of the sermon is so rigorous that it seems almost impossible to fulfil.’ Burgess, ‘Kierkegaard on Homiletics’, 29. Lowrie, Kierkegaard, 274–6. Here Kierkegaard makes another distinction, ‘Certainly a sermon should also bear witness to him, proclaim his word and his teaching, but a sermon is still not his voice.’ CD, 271. This is what Manheimer means when he says, ‘The art of Kierkegaard’s educative language [in the Christian Discourses] depends upon his never speaking “from above.” ’ Ronald J. Manheimer, Kierkegaard as Educator (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 173. However, to not speak ‘from above’ is different from relinquishing authority altogether, which Kierkegaard simply does not do. The discourses are still authoritative, even if they contain indirection, because they speak from the text of Scripture. CD, 271.

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Kierkegaard repeats the fact that what the congregants are hearing is not a sermon a total of three times, all within a very short space within the introduction (of what is already a relatively short speech). Why the need to constantly tell the listener they are not listening to a sermon? The refrain to focus solely on the Communion table (which is meant to be the whole point) feels somewhat punctured by these methodological insertions. To focus solely on the Communion table would surely mean speaking about its contents or meaning, not talking about the accompanying discourse and why it is not actually what they think it is. The perpetual need for the explanation (an explanation repeated in different ways in dozens of Kierkegaard’s other discourses) might in fact be saying something more subtle.80 On his third repetition of the caveat, he adds a detail that begins to give hope to an ‘indirect’ interpretation: ‘What we say here in the prescribed moment is, again, no sermon, and when we have said Amen, the divine service is not as usual essentially over, but then the essential begins.’81 This suggests an implicit critique of the standard Sunday service (already critiqued earlier in the discourse) as well as the reverence given to the pulpit in such services, which negates the pulpit’s fruitfulness in actualizing the Gospel: ‘today the divine service does not as usual center on the pulpit’.82 It is quite possible that Kierkegaard means to say that ‘this is no sermon’ precisely because it is attempting to do what sermons in Copenhagen typically do not do: to move beyond the confines of the service into the ‘essential’; that is, the living-out of Christian truth in actuality, beyond the watching public. A significant challenge to whether Kierkegaard’s discourse/sermon categorization is to be accepted or not is that the tone and essential content of this confessional discourse (as with other discourses) is difficult to distinguish from his Citadelskirke sermon of 1851, which definitely was a sermon (even though, somewhat maddeningly, it was published four years later as a ‘discourse’!). In this sermon, there is exposition, comfort, challenge, and exhortation, using vivid imagery to bring the truth powerfully to the hearers’ understanding.83 Kierkegaard has already said there are crossover elements with a sermon (by both witnessing to Christ and proclaiming his teaching), but what he seems to count as the essentially different aspects are not obvious when you compare them side by side.84 The Citadelskirke sermon – and the reflections in and around it – offers us a fascinating insight into his preacherly vocation both within and beyond the written word. 80

81 82 83 84

The incongruity between the sermonic form of the discourses and Kierkegaard’s ongoing sermonic denial leads Pattison to suggest that Kierkegaard is playing a kind of literary game whereby the reader is urged to enter into ‘a fictional transaction’ in which they suspend their disbelief of the discourses not being sermons. Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, 21. This is an interesting interpretation, though Kierkegaard’s subtlety on this point is likely more a critique of the culture of sermon-making, sermon-giving and sermon-hearing in Christendom than a wholesale return to a new form of doubly indirect communication in its entirety. CD, 271. CD, 270. See ‘The Changelessness of God: A Discourse’, in TM, 263–81. See, for example, the clearly sermonic language in another communion discourse delivered in Vor Frue Kirke (1 September 1848): Then if you perceive that the pleasures of the world captivate you, and you wish to forget; if you perceive that life’s busyness is carrying you away as the current carries the swimmer, and you wish to forget; if the anxieties of temptation pursue you and you fervently wish to be able to forget – then remember him, the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will certainly succeed. PC, 153. Such an exhortation is entirely direct and authoritative in its tone and purpose; it is not merely ‘suggestive’, contra Pattison, who argues that the discourses are complexly dialogical, that they provide a sense

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IV. THE SERMON AT CITADELSKIRKE Kierkegaard’s sermon at Citadelskirke provides us with the most sustained reflection by Kierkegaard himself on his own preaching. He preached the sermon on 18 May 1851, a decade after his first ever sermon. It also stimulated most of what we know of outside feedback on his preaching. Although the fact that those not ordained but with a degree in theology were regularly permitted and called to preach,85 it seems that a Kierkegaard sermon in the pulpit was very rare. Usual estimates range between four and six times in total,86 inclusive of the Friday communion discourses (whatever we may call them). It is not unimaginable, however, that there were more occasions than we know about, especially given some of the letters Kierkegaard received about his preaching and his apparent reputation. As one letter recalls, ‘I have heard that you often preach in various churches but always have yourself announced as “a graduate” ’, then imploring him to enable his hearers ‘to be told when you are going to speak in public.’87 This alone might suggest that Kierkegaard spoke more than a mere handful of times over a ten-year period. Kierkegaard also seemed to have had the option of preaching at his own choosing: ‘My intention had been to deliver a few such sermons during the summer.’88 He later decided this was impossible because of how long it took him to prepare sermons. Again this reflects how high a view he had of the sermon, theologically. But the fact that this sermon was published four years after it was preached (in the midst of the ‘attack’ literature) likely indicates the scarcity of preaching appointments for Kierkegaard between 1851 and 1855. A preacher who preaches regularly would scarcely give second thought to a sermon from four years ago; Kierkegaard deliberately inserts it into his anti-ecclesial arsenal as the balm within the bitterness, a glimmer of hope not only for Kierkegaard’s faith in God but his faith in the possibility of Christian preaching – and eo ipso his faith in the eschatological possibility of the church. The experience of the sermon at Citadelskirke had been existentially challenging for Kierkegaard. As Garff notes, ‘In the morning, prior to his sermon, he prayed to God that something new might be born in him, and he became preoccupied with the notion that, just as parents raise their children and lead them to confirmation, the impending religious service was a sort of confirmation to which he was now being led by his heavenly Father.’89 This sense of felt significance was not because he anticipated anything particularly dramatic occurring; it was merely the living-out of everything for which he criticized the preachers of the establishment. The very idea of the sermon, of speaking – in whatever qualified sense – for God, could not be taken lightly; it must have its effect upon him before he dared proclaim anything to others.90

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of ‘transportation into possibility’ which ‘bars the attempt to understand the text as authoritative’. Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses, 154–5. See Niels-Jørgen Cappelørn, ‘Oprindelighedens Afbrydelse’ (University of Copenhagen: Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1996). See, for example, Søltoft, ‘The Power of Eloquence’, 241. ‘“e——e”—May 21, 1851—S.K.’, LD, 380. JP 6:6769, p. 416 / SKS 24, NB24:74, p. 366. Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 674. This is not to say he was being entirely pious. His reflective anxiety surrounding this sermon was also bound up with the vacillations over his future (to preach or not to preach), and – as with most things – Regine, who was present during the sermon: ‘On Sunday, May 18, I preached in Citadelskirken. It was on my first, my favourite, text: James 1. Also, I confess, with the thought of “her,” also whether it would give her pleasure to hear me.’ JP 6:6769, p. 415 / SKS 24, NB24:74, p. 365. Garff grossly misinterprets this awareness when

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As for the content of the sermon, as noted earlier, it actually follows similar formal conventions to many of the discourses: ‘An important issue in his sermons is a general sense of the confidence in God as opposed to the fragility of earthly existence.’91 Kierkegaard immediately conveys this in the opening to the Citadelskirke sermon by identifying with the existential plight of the listener whose mind might immediately be overwhelmed by their desperate difference to the changeless God: ‘My listener, you have heard the text read [Jas 1.17-21]. How natural now to think of the opposite: the temporal, the changefulness of earthly things, and the changefulness of human beings! How depressing, how exhausting, that all is corruptibility.’92 However, he urges the listeners that remaining in this ‘spirit of gloom’ would mean ‘we not only would not stick to the text, no, we would abandon it, indeed, we would change it’.93 Note here the aforementioned cadence with the Pastoral Seminary discussions, and student Søren’s perennial emphasis on discerning the ‘rhythm’ of the text.94 This is his continual refrain for preachers, and is why many of his discourses treat the text line by line and remain in close ‘proximity’ to its language, even with the use of colourful metaphors and applications which may elucidate it.95 There is no shortage of metaphor on display in the sermon, as Kierkegaard lifts his hearers’ gaze to lose sight of their troubles and to look up to the mountaintop, the inaccessible, the unassailable place where God dwells, because ‘from above there is always only good news’.96 The classically Kierkegaardian distinction between God and humanity, a theme which pervades virtually all Kierkegaard’s theological texts, is profiled throughout the sermon. We are ‘light-minded and unstable human beings’, but God is ‘eternally changeless!’97 But Kierkegaard does not do this to leave an unresolved dread at the thought of God’s indifferent superiority. Rather, God is interested in the ‘trivialities of your life’,98 even those very things that keep us from worshipping him in our listless anxiety. This is what Plekon calls Kierkegaard’s ‘eschatological vision’ in the sermon, in the sense of ‘divine realities inhabiting the earthly ones’.99 In sketching this vision, Kierkegaard’s rhetoric is intensely pastoral, providing his hearers with an almost tangible promise of divine refreshment: ‘when you, weary from all this human, all this temporal and earthly changefulness and alteration, weary of your own instability, could wish for a

91 92 93 94 95

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he speaks of Kierkegaard deliberately using ‘erotic rhetoric’ in the sermon for Regine’s benefit. Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 675. Holm, ‘Kierkegaard and the Church’, 115. TM, 269. TM, 269. LD, 18. Breuninger makes something of a category error when he says: ‘In contrast to expository preaching, which denies the world by focusing on conceptual possibility, Kierkegaard’s communication equips the listener to actuate truth in existence.’ Christian Breuninger, ‘Søren Kierkegaard’s Reformation of Expository Preaching’, The Covenant Quarterly (August 1993): 21–36 [27]. It is true that Kierkegaard’s discourses seek actuation in the listener, but Kierkegaard certainly did understand most of them to be ‘expository’. The biblical text was not merely ornamental but central. Furthermore, expository preaching need not equate to conceptual enslavement to world denial but should be understood as preaching which takes the biblical text as its primary content and seeks to explicate it in the context of the sermon (which can be done in all sorts of interesting ways, as Kierkegaard’s discourses demonstrate). TM, 269. TM, 276. TM, 276. Michael Plekon, ‘Kierkegaard at the End: His “Last” Sermon, Eschatology and the Attack on the Church’, Faith and Philosophy 17, no. 1 (January 2000): 68–86 [72–3].

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place where you could rest your weary head, your weary thoughts, your weary mind, in order to rest, to have a good rest – ah, in God’s changelessness there is rest!’100 These are poetically flourishing words, to be sure, but we know they are not words Kierkegaard has chosen lightly. Indeed, he has chosen them heavily, since he has borne the weight of their reality in his own anxieties, struggles and vacillations, where he too has sought rest in the God of which his favourite text speaks. As he brings the sermon to a close, he explicitly evokes the existential sermonic moment into which he has drawn them, before adding a sharp warning, ‘My listener, this hour is soon over, and the discourse. If you yourself do not want it otherwise, this hour will soon also be forgotten, and the discourse . . . [and] this thought about the changelessness of God will also soon be forgotten in changefulness’101 The hearers are left not only with the surprisingly uplifting revelation of God’s changelessness, but also a powerful caution of the ironical danger that they might contradict the very truth of that sermon by returning to their thoughtless changefulness. They as hearers must now continue the life of the sermon by not forgetting it. This will happen, Kierkegaard warns, unless they ‘want it otherwise’; that is, unless they grasp it for themselves while the moment remains before them. By all accounts the sermon was not easily forgettable. Kierkegaard received several letters thanking him for the sermon, noting just how impactful it had been, such as the enthusiastic response, noted earlier, from a lady called ‘e——e’: Last Sunday you were listed as the preacher in the Citadel. What could I do but walk out there, and I was not disappointed. This was not one of those sermons I have heard so often and forgotten before it was concluded. No, from the rich, warm heart the speech poured forth, terrifying, yet upbuilding and soothing at the same time; it penetrated the heart so as never to be forgotten but to bear the eternal fruits of blessing in rich measure.102 Such a comment must surely have been music to Kierkegaard’s ears, not from selfadmiration, but from the thought that the sermon had not been forgotten. In all his years under the Copenhagen pulpit this had been his greatest frustration, that the sermons that gushed forth from the grand pulpits made no actual impact on the hearts of those who heard them, like the daft geese of his parable, who applaud the fine sermon about flying before proceeding to waddle home from church as normal.103 At least in this instance (which Kierkegaard might remind us is no guarantee in itself of one’s inward transformation) his sermon seemed to have become Christianly consequential – or indeed, actual. And in Kierkegaardian homiletics, there can be no greater mark of a sermon’s success.104 This response was not necessarily an isolated case, either. Another admiring letter, from a lady called ‘S. F.’ arrived the very same day, effusive about the ‘festival . . . of upbuilding’ which the sermon had wrought in her soul. She similarly called for Kierkegaard to bear the title of preacher more explicitly: ‘If only you would preach more often, but please,

100 101 102 103

104

TM, 278. TM, 279. ‘“e——e”—May 21, 1851—S.K.’, LD, 379–80. See Aaron Edwards, ‘Waddling Geese in the Pulpit: Kierkegaard’s Hermeneutics and Preaching’, Theology 116, no. 3 (May/June 2012): 80–9. As Kierkegaard says, ‘a preacher should be such that listeners have to say: “How can I get away from this man? His sermon catches up with me in every hiding place, and how can I get rid of him, since he is over me at every moment?” ’ BA, 105.

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always with your name posted, for you cannot know how many souls you may save from perdition by so doing. It is your clear duty.’105 Another lady, who was deaf, requested a copy of his discourses because, she wrote, ‘I cannot hear your homilies, and you do say something that fortifies me.’106 Kierkegaard’s sermons clearly had something of a reputation, however infrequent they were. Strangely enough, for all this talk of spiritual blessing, upbuilding and fortifying, the deaf lady was not alone in being unable to hear him. In his journal reflections Kierkegaard gave a more sober assessment of the sermon: ‘It went fairly well, but I spoke so faintly that people complained about not being able to hear me.’107 Perhaps it is quite fitting that Kierkegaard seemed to fail in basic communicative technique (so beloved of the homileticians) while seeming to excel in the primary point of what sermons are supposed to do: transform their hearers. In another entry, perhaps gesturing to this irony, he adds, I hear that they were not able to hear me when I preached on Sunday. No doubt it is people who were not in church who want to let me know this, and perhaps by way of the daily newspaper it finally will be known all over the country that they were not able to hear me – after all, this is still something.108 Whatever we might make of this more sardonic reflection, it is undoubtedly true that Kierkegaard did not have a naturally oratorical voice suited to the acoustics of a large church. However, though faint in volume, the voice seemed to have significant impact in its communicative sensitivity. As one contemporary, Peter Christian Zahle, said, ‘No one who has heard him preach will forget that extremely weak, but wonderfully expressive voice. Never have I heard a voice that was so capable of inflecting even the most delicate nuances of expression.’109 See also the recollection from his cousin, Hans Brøchner: ‘His voice, though restrained, was like that of a prince who knows he has the power to command.’110 As much as Kierkegaard rejected his authority, the responses to his preaching – in spite of his unorthodox voice – seem to tell a different story. It was the problem of his voice, as well as other physical defects, that led to the existential turmoil he felt in the aftermath of preaching the sermon: ‘I suffered very much in advance from every possible strain, as I always do when I must make use of my physical being.’111 Some of this appears to have been brought on by the idea of contemplating extemporaneous preaching in future, ‘thus accentuating Christianity as far out

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111

‘S. F.—May 21, 1851—S. K.’, LD, 381–4 [384]. It is quite possible that these two letters might actually be from the same person, given that the writers only give their initials (Kierkegaard, having had no prior acquaintance with them, would not have known their names) and both writers explicitly mention the fact of their femaleness and how, if they had been a man, they would have felt more comfortable exhorting him directly. The letters were also sent to different addresses, so one might speculate that perhaps the writer was hoping to strengthen the case for Kierkegaard to ‘come out’ of his pseudonymous shell and not only preach more often, but allow his name to be announced in advance. To Kierkegaard, such requests might well have seemed to run the risk of hearers being more concerned with ‘who’ preached rather than ‘what’ was preached. See JP 1:591, p. 240 / SKS 21, NB10:190, p. 356. Nevertheless, as Garff notes, Kierkegaard actually was announced by name the day before, in an issue of the Adresseavisen newspaper. See Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 676. ‘Petronella Ross—July 12, 1851—S. K.’, LD, 387–8 [388]. JP 6:6769, p. 416 / SKS 24, NB24:74, p. 366. JP 6:6767, p. 415 / SKS 24, NB24:69, p. 363. Peter Christian Zahle, quoted in Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 675. Hans Brøchner, ‘The Recollections’, in Glimpses and Impressions of Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. T. H. Croxall (Welwyn: James Nisbet, 1959), 7–44 [18]. JP 6:6769, p. 415 / SKS 24, NB24:74, p. 365.

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as possible’. This seemed to catalyse a domino effect where the stress of this idea made him ‘listless’, then miserably sick: ‘I began to feel terribly the dismaying, agonizing pain that constitutes my personal limits’.112 This was more than the age-old preacherly condition of ‘blue Monday’, this was a struggle for his existential identity as a proclaimer of Christianity. As well as it seemed to have gone at Citadelskirke, the challenge of extemporaneity continued to haunt Kierkegaard as the only way he could truly live out the kenotic Christian imperative in preaching. He felt caught between the existential ideal and the physical impossibility: ‘[I] even contemplated forcing myself to do it. Now my torment increased.’113 At the end of what must have been a dark week of the soul, Kierkegaard finally came out the other side of the struggle seemingly sensing a momentous confirmation of his primary call: to writing, not preaching.114 As far as we know, Citadelskirke on 18 May 1851 was the last time anyone ever saw Søren Kierkegaard preach a sermon from a pulpit.

CONCLUSION: THE PREACHER TO PREACHERS Kierkegaard’s preaching vocation (we dare not call it a ‘career’) was, as we have seen, fairly complex and anything but straightforward. The way he spoke about and – in one way or another – practiced preaching in and through his written discourses, would alone give us reason to call him ‘a preacher’, even if one of a very peculiar sort. But his journal reflections on his ever-fragile vocation show us just how much this meant to him, and just how close he might have been to taking it on in a more sustained way. Many times we read lines like this: ‘At times I have considered laying down my pen and, if anything should be done, to use my voice.’115 For one reason or another, he never felt he could pass his own homiletical test: ‘authority or direct proclamation is not really in my range, for I cannot, after all, fulfil the prerequisites. I can very well assume a pastoral appointment, for it does not involve the rigorous concept of Christian proclamation.’116 He wrestles with his own perceived unworthiness for the task of Christian proclamation, given the high esteem with which he held it,117 as well as how impossible genuine Christian preaching actually was within the Christendom pastorate. Indeed, even though the call to writing prevailed over a full-time pulpit ministry, this was not because Kierkegaard himself did not believe in its importance, as Holm notes, ‘Despite being a very prolific writer himself, Kierkegaard knew that the spoken word had

112 113 114 115 116 117

JP 6:6769, p. 417 / SKS 24, NB24:74, p. 366. JP 6:6769, p. 417 / SKS 24, NB24:74, p. 366. JP 6:6769, p. 417 / SKS 24, NB24:74, p. 367. JP 6:6770, p. 418 /SKP X 6 B 4:3. JP 6:6616, p. 314 / SKS 23, NB18:33, p. 272. On this, of course, Kierkegaard could also be critiqued (as indeed his admiring hearers had also urged). We can wonder whether he ought to have shaken off the shackles of such modesty and imitated the humility of the many preachers in history who also felt unworthy of the preaching task but who eo ipso knew they must pursue the ‘impossible’ call (this includes almost all the Old Testament prophets). Kierkegaard never truly relinquished the preacherly burden, and, perhaps due to his inability to accept the call undialectically, he remained tormented by what Jeremiah called ‘a burning fire shut up in my bones’ which cannot be contained (Jer. 20.9). Perhaps Kierkegaard could say he released this ‘fire’ in the attack literature. To some extent this is true. But given the existential burden which preaching obviously was for him, one gets the sense there was far more he might have done in the pulpit had he been able to overcome the vocational tension that so plagued him.

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a distinctive ability to touch and change human beings in a manner different from that of the written word.’118 Part of this was Kierkegaard’s belief in the need for preaching to be infused with ‘explosive’ urgency and passion.119 That is, it must have the character of a dramatic event. Indeed, in spite of Kierkegaard’s reflections on the importance of indirect communication, preaching ought to be heard ‘honestly, loudly, and clearly’.120 Because of his impairments, he felt he could not do this. Furthermore, the sweeping force of those final polemical years – where his call to ‘attack’ the established church became more pronounced – meant that his vocation as a preacher remained largely unfulfilled in his own time. Though not, perhaps, in our own time. Precisely because of how much Kierkegaard thought, wrote, reflected and stressed about preaching, his writings remain one of the most unique gifts to modern preachers as they contemplate the severity and ideality of their task in the face of their own changeableness and God’s changeless love. One of the reasons Kierkegaard’s insights on preaching are so unique and so deeply applicable to the preaching task is that, unlike most contemporary approaches to homiletics, Kierkegaard understands how deeply connected preaching is to the existential. He foresaw the problems of any homiletic which assumed that Christ could be preached like any other oratory topic: ‘to entrust the proclaiming of Christianity to speech experts is eo ipso to do away with Christianity.’121 Kierkegaard saw that although preaching is the proclaiming of doctrinal truth (and he never denied this), it is never mere doctrine or mere assent to truth. Nor is it mere technique, mere poetics, or mere social observation. Preaching comes down from the mountaintop as the existential revelation of God’s Word, which can only be truly heard when God transforms the hearer through it. Kierkegaard saw that preaching is only preaching when it means to change your life. Nothing else will do. And as Kierkegaard observed in Copenhagen, preaching that does not seek to change your life actually does more harm than good, and violates the Gospel. The problem with Christendom was that not many people noticed when nothing changed. The changelessness of the church was precisely what kept the system going. Change was, like Kierkegaard himself, an inconvenience. His challenge to the preachers of Christendom, and to all preachers, is to be prepared for all that might indeed change if we truly do want to preach Christ. He is the changeless One who wills to change us before, during and after the sermon. Kierkegaard’s quietly commanding voice still resounds to all would-be pulpiteers and sermonizers: ‘Truly it is a risk to preach!’122

FURTHER READING Burgess, Andrew J. ‘Kierkegaard on Homiletics and the Genre of the Sermon’. Journal of Communication and Religion 17, no. 2 (September 1994): 17–31. Edwards, Aaron. ‘Kierkegaard as Socratic Street Preacher?: Reimagining the Dialectic of Direct and Indirect Communication for Christian Proclamation’. Harvard Theological Review 110, no. 2 (April 2017): 280–300. Edwards, Aaron. ‘Life in Kierkegaard’s Imaginary Rural Parish: Preaching, Correctivity, and the Gospel’. Toronto Journal of Theology 30, no. 2 (Fall 2014): 235–46.

118 119 120 121 122

Holm, ‘Kierkegaard and the Church’, 115. EUD, 69. JP 6:6947, p. 557 / SKP XI 3 B 57. JP 3:3535, p. 617 / SKS 26, NB31:141, pp. 106–7. PC, 235.

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Pattison, George. ‘Proclaiming the Word’. In Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century: The Paradox and the ‘Point of Contact’, 172–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Plekon, Michael. ‘Kierkegaard at the End: His “Last” Sermon, Eschatology and the Attack on the Church’. Faith and Philosophy 17, no. 1 (January 2000): 68–86.

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CHAPTER NINE

Kierkegaard’s Theological Legacy LEE C. BARRETT

I. KIERKEGAARD’S THEOLOGICAL POLYVALENCE Kierkegaard has often been hailed as one of the most influential Christian thinkers in the modern period, credited, along with Kant, Hegel and Schleiermacher, with setting theology on a dramatic new course. This assessment has always been controversial, for according to many of his other interpreters Kierkegaard was not really a theologian at all. Some claim that he was most essentially a literary provocateur, and others that he was an apologist for existentialism, and yet others that he was a non-doctrinal guide to the devotional life. Even within the ranks of those who discern a strong theological dimension in Kierkegaard’s authorship, there is vast disagreement about the nature of his theological vision. Ever since the first reception of his works, a dizzying plethora of theological trajectories have all claimed Kierkegaard as their source and inspiration. The sheer multiplicity of appropriations raises questions about the viability of saying anything definite about Kierkegaard’s theological legacy. This array of interpretations is understandable, for Kierkegaard’s writings do not look like ordinary theology. His reflections on theological matters are rambling, piecemeal, and sometimes ostensibly self-contradictory. This should not be surprising, for Kierkegaard’s distaste for speculative philosophical systems was matched by his antipathy to totalizing theological systems. If theology is taken to be a sequential exposition of religious topics governed by some logical schema, then Kierkegaard was certainly not a theologian. His authorship is a disjointed hodgepodge of short stories, devotional discourses, aphorisms and parodies of philosophical treatises, all defying ordinary genre expectations. One page may look like a sustained argument, complete with a string of logical entailments, while the next will appear to be a congeries of meandering witticisms. He shifts authorial voice with disorienting frequency, sometimes writing as a penitent, sometimes as a humourist, sometimes as a philosophical dilettante, sometimes as a literary critic and sometimes as a panegyrist for Christian virtues. This kaleidoscope of authorial identities characterizes his signed literature just as much as it does his pseudonymous books; even in his edifying texts he speaks with carefully constructed voices (often several different voices within the same text). His individual books are riddled with incongruities and ironic retractions. His chapters are alternately glib and ponderous, flippant and earnest. Instead of producing a comprehensive and integrated overview of faith-related issues, Kierkegaard advances different theological claims in different contexts. His various theological

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fragments gesture in seemingly divergent directions, defying easy appropriation. Because this disconcerting literary maze has so many pathways, theologians with very different sensibilities and agendas have been able to find some strand in his authorship to elaborate and claim as their inspiration. His authorship was so elusive and polyvalent that it was inevitable that his theological legacies would be multiple. For decades interpretative debates have raged not only about the content of Kierkegaard’s theological vision but even more basically about his way of doing theology and the possible theological goals of his writing. Most of these controversies revolve around one foundational issue: what is the relation of his valorization of what he variously calls subjectivity, pathos and inwardness to his substantive theological claims? Was his appropriation and sometimes reinterpretation of traditional doctrinal claims governed by an independent and more foundational account of human subjectivity, or was his account of subjectivity governed by his commitment to certain authoritative Christian convictions? This methodological question is closely connected to the issue of the relation of generic religiosity to the specificity of Christianity. It also has significant implications for the ways in which he treated the relation of nature and grace, the continuity or discontinuity of ordinary human loves and Christian love, and the interaction of reason and revelation. To shed some light on these matters, this chapter will seek to differentiate the various theological legacies that claim Kierkegaard as their ancestor (or as their nemesis) and show how each one either sought to demonstrate some indebtedness to his authorship, or to position itself as a reaction against his works. I will also argue that Kierkegaard’s distinctive way of doing theology, with its complex and multiple dimensions, was developed in response to particular theological tendencies in his early nineteenth-century context. Several different intellectual movements were vying for dominance in ‘Golden Age’ Denmark, and all of them left their marks, positive or negative, upon his work. The variety of theological trajectories in his literature is partly a function of the variety of theological orientations with which he interacted. The subtle ways in which he differentiated his own approach to theology from those of his contemporaries in part accounts for the elusive nature of his own work, for in relation to different conversation partners he developed different themes and employed different strategies. This variety of interlocutors and the consequent variety of theological emphases in Kierkegaard’s works would enable different interpreters to develop his thought in significantly different directions. We will examine the major theological tendencies that impacted Kierkegaard, then briefly consider his response to each one and finally identify the subsequent theological movements that elaborated that particular response. As we shall see, the original theological movement to which he was responding was often perpetuated in modified form in the later theologies that claimed him as a progenitor.

II. KIERKEGAARD AS THEOLOGICAL SCEPTIC One older trajectory that continued to play an influential role in Kierkegaard’s theological environment was the rationalism and scepticism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Long before Kierkegaard’s birth, the more radical Enlightenment ‘philosophes’ had questioned the credibility of any ‘positive’ religion based exclusively on the dubious assertions of an historical revelation. In their eyes, the lack of corroborating logical arguments or empirical evidence rendered Christianity’s claim to truth very questionable.

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Besides doubting the epistemic basis of many core beliefs, Deists often denounced a host of orthodox doctrines as prime examples of ecclesial mystification and conceptual unintelligibility. As an alternative to subservience to inherited doctrine, most Deists appealed to reason’s allegedly indubitable dictates. To amplify their critique, the Enlightenmentstyle rationalists frequently claimed that the esoteric doctrines of Christianity play no useful role in moral or religious practice. Kierkegaard was well aware of this tradition, for in Denmark Baron Frederik Christian Wedel-Jarlsberg had popularized critiques of dogmatic theology and the institutional church, and had argued for the reduction of Christianity to moral and civic principles.1 More moderate thinkers only used reason as a critical tool to weed out irrational doctrines, and as a hermeneutic aid to clarify the true import of the salvageable beliefs. They embraced historical criticism of the sacred texts in order to recover their original meaning and authenticity, even though such investigations often undermined the credibility of the doctrinal traditions of the church. This milder rationalism was mediated to Kierkegaard’s generation in a variety of ways. Nicolai Balle, the influential author of the catechism adopted by the Danish church and imbibed by the young Søren, purged dogmatics of ecclesial obfuscations and interpreted the Christian life through the lens of rational moral principles.2 Many of the theological textbooks that Kierkegaard studied, such as the volumes on doctrine by the moderately rationalistic Karl Bretschneider, questioned the authority of traditional doctrines that could not meet reason’s criteria of intelligibility and plausibility.3 The influential German biblical scholar Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, whose scriptural expositions Kierkegaard studied, used historical criticism of the Bible to reform inherited teachings.4 Kierkegaard even became familiar with the much more radical biblical investigations of scholars like David Friedrich Strauss, whose historical reconstruction of the life of Jesus destabilized traditional understandings of the incarnation.5 The work of Immanuel Kant radicalized the Enlightenment’s epistemic caution by employing reason to critique its own metaphysical pretensions. Kant’s restrictions on the legitimate range of pure reason prohibited speculation about all transcendent matters, including God in se. Moreover, Kant dismissed all doctrines that were unnecessary for the pursuit of the moral life. Far from being comprehensible in terms of pure reason, many confessional formulae could not even be defended as postulates of practical reason. Kierkegaard absorbed such Kantian anti-metaphysical sensibilities from multiple channels during his student days, including the lectures of H. N. Clausen.6 To an extent, Kierkegaard was the heir of the Kantian suspicion of metaphysics that had roots in the later phase of the Enlightenment.7

1

2 3

4 5 6

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Frederik Christian Wedel-Jarlsberg, Den geistlige Stand bør afskaffes (Copenhagen: Christian Frederik Holm, 1795–7). Nicolai Edinger Balle, Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion (Copenhagen: Jens Hostrup Schultz, 1824). Karl Bretschneider, Handbuch der Dogmatik der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirke, vols 1–2, 3rd edn (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1828). Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette, Dogmatik der protestantischen Kirche, 2 vols (Berlin: Reimer, 1840). David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, trans. George Eliot (Ramsey: Sigler, 1994). See Roe Fremstedal, Kierkegaard and Kant on Radical Evil and the Highest Good (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). See Ronald M. Green, Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).

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Kierkegaard was fiercely critical of the rationalist aspect of the Enlightenment impulse, particularly its effort to construct a chastened form of Christianity upon the foundation of reason. Much of his authorship, particularly the writings of the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, voiced the protest that rationalism’s underlying mood of objectivity is utterly ill-suited for understanding Christian concepts. Kierkegaard repeatedly insisted that Christian faith is not based on any sort of empirical evidence or on the cogency of metaphysical arguments. In expressing his antipathy to Enlightenment rationalism, Kierkegaard was implicitly endorsing the Kantian suspicion of metaphysical claims. While he rejected the constitutive use of reason to establish religious convictions, he did put reason to a sceptical use, undermining any effort to prove Christian doctrines or even to make them seem probable. Subsequent theologians would respond differently to Kierkegaard’s metaphysical scepticism. As soon as Kierkegaard’s literature became available, some religious thinkers focused on this sceptical aspect of his thought and applauded him as the doubting critic of Christian orthodoxy. His defence of subjectivity was seen as a rebellion against the heteronomy of the church and its doctrines. In the influential work of Georg Brandes8 in Denmark and Christoph Schrempf9 in Germany, Kierkegaard was construed as the champion of the autonomous individual, resisting conformity to the values and claims of corporate Christendom. Brandes’s enormously influential book on Kierkegaard distinguished Kierkegaard’s allegiance to Christianity, which was dismissed as the product of his pathological religious upbringing, from his commitment to the individual and authentic inwardness. Brandes condemned Kierkegaard’s failure to appreciate modernity, toleration and the ethical life but praised his critique of the church, which Brandes believed should have led Kierkegaard to reject Christian orthodoxy and become a free-thinker. Although both Brandes and Schrempf recognized that Kierkegaard’s passionate scepticism differed from the cool intellectual caution of the Enlightenment, they perceived his drive to be liberated from ecclesial authoritarianism to be the descendant of the Enlightenment spirit. Other appropriators of Kierkegaard would focus not so much on the usefulness of his work in criticizing ecclesial traditions, but rather on the implications of his dismissal of rationalistic apologetics. In the 1930s, Lev Shestov, who influenced a generation of existentially inclined theologians, welcomed what he took to be Kierkegaard’s condemnation of the imperious claims of rationality and his rebellion against the Enlightenment project.10 This impulse to look to Kierkegaard to find ammunition for a sceptical critique of inherited doctrine would resurface in the 1960s in the works of the ‘secular’ and ‘death of God’ theologians like Harvey Cox and Thomas Altizer, who all rejected the conceptualization of God as a supernatural being. Over a decade later Don Cupitt radicalized Kant’s reservations about making transcendent claims and proposed that Kierkegaard’s turn to subjectivity should have led him to reject all talk of God as an external reality.11 Although many of these readers of Kierkegaard were critics of the Enlightenment, in some ways they continued and intensified the Enlightenment’s critique of supernaturalism, and enlisted Kierkegaard as a fellow traveller.

8 9

10

11

Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard: En kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1877). Christoph Schrempf, Sören Kierkegaard: Ein unfreier Pionier der Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main: Neuer Frankfurter Verlag, 1907). Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, trans. Elinor Hewitt (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969). Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (London: SCM, 1984).

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Other theologians have reacted negatively to Kierkegaard’s critique of metaphysics and have accused him of an anti-rational fideism. For example, John Cobb, a staunch defender of Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s metaphysics, feared that Kierkegaard’s faith was a failure to take the structures of objective reality seriously.12 In a very different vein, Francis Schaeffer, the celebrated champion of Protestant scholasticism, excoriated Kierkegaard for denigrating reason and thereby promoting the relativism that has afflicted modernity.13 Neo-Thomist Catholic theologians like Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange likewise suspected Kierkegaard of a dangerous irrationalism.14 Even the Catholic convert and animating spirit of the Hochland Circle, Theodor Haecker, who appreciated Kierkegaard’s attention to subjectivity, criticized his failure to admit the efficacy of rational calculations of probability in Christian apologetics.15 Kierkegaard’s reservations about the power of reason led to another divergence in his theological legacy. Reacting against the tradition of his teacher H. N. Clausen, Kierkegaard articulated grave doubts about the utility of the historical-critical approach to the canon, for it made the content of the faith contingent upon the results of empirical investigation. Over against this modernist impulse, Kierkegaard stressed the role of normative Christian passions and existential concerns in the interpretative process. As a result, many biblical scholars dismissed Kierkegaard as a fundamentalist who was content with a noncritical reading of the scriptural texts. However, in the twentieth century, other biblical scholars like Rudolf Bultmann were inspired by Kierkegaard’s reservations to develop a more engaged, self-involved hermeneutic.16 In a different way, later-twentieth-century biblical theologians like Paul Minear were influenced by Kierkegaard to attend to the way the Bible functions to shape the lives of believers, or like Hugh Pyper to emphasize the rhetorical potentialities of biblical texts.17 Extending this trajectory, Timothy Polk appropriated Kierkegaard in order to argue that the canon only comes to have authority and definite meaning as it is used to nurture love.18

III. KIERKEGAARD AS ANTI-METAPHYSICAL GRAMMARIAN OF CHRISTIAN LANGUAGE Another factor of supreme importance in Kierkegaard’s theological environment, one to which he reacted very negatively, was the speculative idealism epitomized by G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel famously argued that a triadic movement informs the evolution of ‘Spirit’, proceeding from undifferentiated identity, through differentiation and alienation, to the synthesis of identity and difference, actualized in the concrete individual. According to Hegel, this triadic dynamic is the articulation in a proper conceptual form of the more pictorial language of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The exact meaning of Hegel’s language about God became a controversial issue.19 According to some of his disciples, Hegel was 12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19

John Cobb, ‘The Practical Importance of Metaphysics’, Process Perspectives 33, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 9. Francis Schaeffer, Escape from Reason (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1968). For an account of Garrigou-Lagrange, see Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 133–4. Theodor Haecker, ‘Über Kardinal Newmans Glaubensphilosophie’, Der Brenner 6, no. 10 (1921): 772–90. Rudolf Bultmann, Das Evangelium des Johannes, 10th edn (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1962). Hugh S. Pyper, The Joy of Kierkegaard (London: Routledge, 2014). Paul Minear and Paul Morimoto, Kierkegaard and the Bible: An Index (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1953). Timothy H. Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997). Cyril O’Regan, ‘The Trinity in Kant, Hegel, and Schelling’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity, ed. O. P. Giles Emery and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 254–66.

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suggesting that this dynamic is rooted in God’s inner being, logically prior to and apart from its enactment in the world, but according to others he was claiming that God is not fully real in abstraction, apart from the historical evolution of Spirit. Awareness of Hegel’s speculative philosophy was mediated to Kierkegaard in a variety of ways. In 1837 Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the influential Danish poet, playwright, and philosopher, lauded Hegel for correctly perceiving that all thought and reality are the movement of universality, particularity and their synthesis in individuality.20 Kierkegaard heard similar Hegelian themes expressed by Philipp Marheineke, whose lectures he attended in Berlin in 1841/2, and whose textbook on Christian doctrine he cited in his journals.21 In Denmark, Hans Lassen Martensen recast Hegel’s ruminations about Spirit in a more traditional guise.22 Martensen was enormously important for Kierkegaard’s development, for he served as Kierkegaard’s theology tutor and later became the target of many of Kierkegaard’s polemics. Kierkegaard heard Martensen’s lectures on speculative theology, observed his rise to theological and ecclesiastical prominence and reacted negatively to his influential tome on Christian doctrine published in 1849.23 Although Martensen was deeply indebted to Hegel, throughout his career he sought to articulate a speculative understanding of God’s being apart from the world.24 He protested that the Trinity is not just the necessary moments in God’s life in which difference returns to unity, for God is free and self-conscious in the acts of creation and redemption.25 Kierkegaard’s antipathy to the speculative approach to theology ran deep and was grounded in his basic understanding of the way that Christian language works. Kierkegaard did not believe that the meaning of any Christian conviction could be articulated in a mood of academic neutrality, as if a theological doctrine were the conclusion of a syllogism or the resolution of a metaphysical puzzle. For Kierkegaard the wedding of metaphysics and orthodox language is a sterile union that undermines the very mood of self-involvement that any discussion of God requires, replacing it with the mood of cool objectivity. Consequently, Kierkegaard did not attempt to clarify Christian concepts by situating them in a metaphysical schema, no matter how sophisticated that schema might be. Instead, Kierkegaard sought to clarify the passions which are constitutive of the meaningful use of Christian discourse. Although God cannot be described or analysed directly, the emotions, passions and dispositions that constitute a life lived in the light of God can be imaginatively depicted. For Kierkegaard, the meaningfulness of Christian discourse is dependent upon the ability to imagine the hopes, fears and loves that accompany its use. The meaning of Christian concepts can only be elucidated by clarifying the way that they function to inform the passions and actions of the faithful individual. Kierkegaard’s emphatic rejection of speculative metaphysics, and his shift to the clarification of the use of Christian language to shape pathos, became a fundamental theme for an influential tradition of Kierkegaard interpretation and inspired a variety

20

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22

23 24

25

Johan Ludvig Heiberg, ‘Recension over Hr. Dr. Rothes Treenigheds – og Forsoningslære’, Perseus, no. 1 (1837): 1–89. Philipp K. Marheineke, Lehrbuch des christlichen Glaubens und Lebens für denkende Christen, 2nd edn (Berlin: Nicolai, 1836). Robert Leslie Horn, Positivity and Dialectic: A Study of the Theological Method of Hans Lassen Martensen (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 2007), 44–55. Hans Lassen Martensen, Den christelige Dogmatik (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1849). Hans Lassen Martensen, De autonomia conscientiæ sui humanæ in theologiam dogmaticum nostri temporis introducta (Copenhagen: I. D. Quist, 1837). KJN 2, pp. 342–52 / SKS 18, KK:11, pp. 374–86.

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of twentieth-century theologians and philosophers. Paul Holmer26 and D. Z. Phillips27 detected in Kierkegaard a Wittgenstein-like understanding of theology as the clarification of the grammar of Christian concepts. According to these thinkers, Kierkegaard shared with Wittgenstein the conviction that religiously significant concepts cannot be understood by situating them in an artificial meta-framework, for in such frameworks all words lose their intelligibility. Words only acquire meaning when they are used to accomplish specific goals in specific contexts. Therefore, according to this construal of Kierkegaard, theology must attend to the use of Christian language to modify human subjectivity, for it is only in such passional contexts of edification that the vocabulary of faith is meaningful. In the case of Phillips, this view of theology as the clarification of patterned ways of using Christian language raised questions about the extralinguistic reality of the referents of such language. Paul Holmer was clearer that Christian words are indeed used referringly, but that such reference can only be significant when the appropriate passional context is present. Many of Holmer’s students, including David Gouwens, Timothy Polk, Lee Barrett, Andrew Burgess, Abrahim Khan and David Cain all elaborated Holmer’s contention that theological intelligibility requires both the constitutive language of the Christian community and the appropriate forms of pathos. For example, David Gouwens has argued that Christian doctrines are neither mere cognitive propositions nor immediate expressions of pious subjectivity.28 Kierkegaard did not abandon the ‘how’ of faith in a futile effort to construct a passion-neutral doctrinal system, nor did he reduce the ‘what’ of faith to a set of subjective states. Kierkegaard’s basic goal was the clarification of Christian teachings, and his attention to pathos was simply part of that project. Accordingly, Sylvia Walsh has contended that Kierkegaard’s literary strategies nurture the reader’s capacity to envision a new ideal way of life and to feel its attraction.29 Other theologians have pushed the anti-metaphysical aspects of Kierkegaard’s writings in rather different directions. These authors often see his rejection of a ‘metaphysics of presence’ as pointing forward to post-structuralism or to the ‘rhetorical turn’ in theology. Typically, these readers take the destabilizing aspects of Kierkegaard’s literature very seriously, and see his resistance to univocity and closure as part of his theological meaning. In the 1980s Mark C. Taylor helped transform the understanding of the anti-metaphysical aspect of Kierkegaard’s work, claiming that the theme of radical alterity suggests that nothing at all can be said about God.30 John Caputo, significantly influenced by Jacques Derrida, implicitly located Kierkegaard at least somewhere near the apophatic tradition, with a strong imperative to embrace the ‘other.’31 Avoiding extreme claims about the undecidability of language, George Pattison has argued that Kierkegaard’s literary strategies counteract self-mastery and open the individual to grace and particularity.32 Steven Shakespeare contends that Kierkegaard’s indeterminacy subverts any theological

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Paul L. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, ed. David J. Gouwens and Lee C. Barrett III (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012). D. Z. Phillips, ‘Authorship and Authenticity: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein’, in Wittgenstein and Religion (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993). David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Sylvia Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987). John Caputo, How to Read Kierkegaard (London: Granta, 2014). George Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith (London: SPCK, 1997).

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metanarrative, and undermines closed doctrinal systems. Kierkegaard offers the reader no predigested morsels of truth, but rather goads the reader to encounter the ineffable.33

IV. KIERKEGAARD THE THEOLOGIAN OF SUBJECTIVITY A very different theological trajectory prevalent in the northern Europe of Kierkegaard’s day emerged partly from Pietism. Although most Pietists nominally affirmed the whole gamut of Lutheran or Reformed doctrines, they focused their theological attention more intensively on doctrines that could be extrapolated directly from the experiences of sin and redemption, and used soteriological experience as the lens to interpret all theological concepts. This more experiential approach to theology was exemplified by Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, whose legacy informed the Moravian community in Copenhagen that influenced the young Kierkegaard. Reacting against the cognitive emphasis of postReformation Protestant scholasticism, the Pietists insisted that theological assertions are only meaningful when they are embedded in the appropriate form of Christian subjectivity. Friedrich Schleiermacher, influenced by Pietism, recast Pietism’s subjective turn in a way that was more attractive to the cultured elites of northern Europe, reinterpreting Christian doctrines as second-order articulations and codifications of Christian selfconsciousness, the lived experience of redemption.34 According to Schleiermacher, much of scholastic Protestant orthodoxy had claimed to know too much about God, and had advanced doctrinal propositions that were not directly expositions of the believer’s spiritual dependence upon Jesus Christ and the church’s empowerment by the Holy Spirit. Kierkegaard was very familiar with Schleiermacher and his legacy. In 1834, Kierkegaard engaged in a tutorial on Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith with H. L. Martensen. Knowledge of Schleiermacher was also mediated to Kierkegaard by Henrik Nicolai Clausen, under whom Kierkegaard studied, who shared Schleiermacher’s reservations about the traditional formulations of doctrines.35 Kierkegaard’s response to Schleiermacher was ambivalent. His early journals show that he appreciated Schleiermacher’s valorization of Christian self-consciousness, and his resistance to the ossification of faith into a dogmatic system. However, Kierkegaard came to suspect that Schleiermacher’s identification of faith with absolute dependence suggested a comfortable ‘first immediacy’ that did not take the fear and trembling of perpetually striving against sin and the possibility of offence seriously enough.36 Schleiermacher failed to do justice to the ways in which faith is a continuing struggle, and tended to treat it as a static feeling of being united with God. But even with these failings, Schleiermacher had rightly resituated theology in the domain of human pathos, not in abstract speculation. Kierkegaard himself was of course a premier champion of the role of subjectivity in the Christian life and in the doing of theology, and in this respect he did resemble Schleiermacher and the Pietist tradition, although his description of Christian pathos differed from that of Schleiermacher. The pseudonym Climacus insisted that the cultivation of the appropriate forms of pathos is a necessary (but not a sufficient) condition for understanding Christian convictions.37 In Climacus’s vocabulary, the ‘how’ of becoming a

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Steven Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999). KJN 3, pp. 36–7 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:7, pp. 42–3. KJN 7, pp. 55–6 / SKS 23, 58, NB15:83, pp. 116–19. See CUP / SKS 7.

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Christian is essential for grasping the ‘what’. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s edifying and devotional literature persistently instantiated this attention to the stimulation and nurture of the individual’s religious inwardness. Countless Kierkegaard expositors and theologians inspired by Kierkegaard have focused on his attention to Christian subjectivity in particular and human subjectivity in general. Concentrating on the pseudonymous literature, they have often used Kierkegaard’s writings to develop a phenomenology of religious experience which then serves as a foundational anthropology. Typically this account of human experience is treated as being separable from Kierkegaard’s Christian commitments and logically prior to his more explicitly doctrinal convictions. Usually this anthropology then serves as a framework for the reinterpretation of traditional theological themes. Most often, Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety and despair serves as the prism through which everything else is viewed. In this way, Kierkegaard’s legacy is somewhat congruent with that of the Pietists and Schleiermacher, who had also foregrounded the experiential movement from alienation to reconciliation. This way of appropriating Kierkegaard has enjoyed a long and variegated history. Rasmus Nielsen elaborated Kierkegaard’s differentiation of subjective knowing from objective cognition, but then proposed that the two spheres can be harmonized without contradiction.38 At the end of the nineteenth century, Niels Teisen employed Kierkegaard to promote a Christianity based on inward deepening, and to critique an orthodoxy founded on assent to propositions.39 A. B. Drachmann more radically associated Kierkegaard’s subjectivity with a Socratic inwardness that was independent of Christianity.40 Eduard Geismar, who sought to mediate between the emphasis on the individual’s subjectivity and historic Christianity, also enlisted the aid of Kierkegaard to resist an overly cognitive approach to Christianity and to foster an intensification of the experience of reliance upon God.41 The influential German theologian Emanuel Hirsch stressed the continuity in Kierkegaard’s works between ‘religiousness A’ (general spirituality) and Christian faith, a strategy that he unfortunately used to support his advocacy of Christian nationalism.42 Taking a somewhat more nuanced approach, Torsten Bohlin claimed that a tension could be detected in Kierkegaard’s theological method between a theology based on a phenomenology of religious experience and a theology based on the paradoxical revelation of God in the incarnation, and then argued for the priority of the subjective dimension.43 In a more cautious way, some evangelicals like Edward John Carnell of Fuller Theological Seminary appealed to Kierkegaard’s emphasis on subjectivity in order to critique the fundamentalist scholasticism from which they were trying to distinguish themselves.44 Kierkegaard’s assertions that faith is not mere assent to propositions and is not a rationally demonstrable ideology proved to be attractive weapons in this struggle. Carnell insisted that faith is the fruit of the dynamics of the heart, particularly the passionate longing for reconciliation. An apologetics based on historical evidence or alleged

38 39 40

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42 43 44

Rasmus Nielsen, Grundideernes Logik, vols 1–2 (Copenhagen: Den Gyldensdalske Boghandling, 1864–6). Niels Teisen, Om Søren Kierkegaards Betydning som kristelig Tænker (Copenhagen: J. Frimodt, 1903). A. B. Drachmann, ‘Hedenskab og Christendom hos Søren Kierkegaard’, in Udvalgte Afhandlinger (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1911), 124–40. Eduard Geismar, Søren Kierkegaard: Hans Livsudvikling og Forfattervirksomhed (Copenhagen: G. E. C. Gad, 1926–8). Emanuel Hirsch, Kierkegaard Studien (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1930–3). Torsten Bohlin, Søren Kierkegaard (Uppsala: Svenska Kyrkans Diakonistyrelses Bokförlag, 1918). Edward John Carnell, The Burden of Søren Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965).

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metaphysical proofs is actually inimical to the risky and engaged subjectivity that faith requires. Other theologians with Pietist roots like Bernard Ramm45 and Kyle Roberts46 have in different ways continued the valorization of Kierkegaard as the apologist for heartfelt Christian subjectivity. In a very different manner, Christian existentialists like Rudolf Bultmann also elaborated Kierkegaard’s foregrounding of passionate subjectivity.47 Bultmann used Kierkegaard’s account of the quest for authentic existence to make sense of the Bible’s eschatological language. For Bultmann, Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair provides the key to understanding the scriptural movement from bondage to false securities to radical trust in a God who cannot be objectified. In general, Bultmann’s entire project of demythologization borrowed from Kierkegaard’s rejection of an historical point of departure for faith. Similarly, Paul Tillich adapted Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety and despair to critique Christian idealism’s belief in a happy relation of essential and existential being.48 Relying on The Sickness unto Death, Tillich proposed that the dialectical tensions intrinsic to human being are the source of humanity’s estrangement from essential being. Like Bultmann, Tillich also used Kierkegaard to resist all objectifying language about God. Reinhold Niebuhr likewise used Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety to reinterpret the doctrine of original sin without positing a biological transmission of sin from Adam and Eve.49 Niebuhr rejected theological liberalism’s optimism about historical progress, and treated Kierkegaard as an ally in the neo-orthodox recovery of the doctrines of sin and grace. Niebuhr also was indebted to Kierkegaard for his reinterpretation of the imago Dei as the individual’s capacity for self-transcendence, and for the identification of faith with trust in God’s commitment to support the individual in her attempt to negotiate the dialectical tension of the finite and the infinite in human nature.

V. KIERKEGAARD AS A DOCTRINALLY ORIENTED THEOLOGIAN A different theological sensibility in Kierkegaard’s Denmark resisted the efforts to interpret Christianity exclusively through the lens of human subjectivity, and argued for the authority of traditional doctrines. This congeries of very different theological orientations would also have a complex impact upon Kierkegaard. Bishop Jacob Mynster himself, the primate of Denmark and a friend of the Kierkegaard family, defended the supernatural source and referent of traditional Christian beliefs. Other thinkers in Kierkegaard’s Denmark were even more forceful in defending orthodox doctrines from the apparently heterodox implications of modernity. For example, the ‘old orthodox’ party associated with Andreas Rudelbach insisted upon the normative status of the Lutheran confessions, while the influential pastor N. F. S. Grundtvig claimed divine authority for the Apostles’ Creed.50 While Kierkegaard remained critical of the complacency, false security and 45 46 47 48 49 50

Bernard Ramm, Types of Apologetic Systems (Wheaton, IL: Van Kampen Press, 1953). Kyle Roberts, Emerging Prophet: Kierkegaard and the Postmodern People of God (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013). Bultmann, Das Evangelium des Johannes. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vols 1–3 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1951–63). Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 1 (New York: Scribners, 1941). See Søren Jensen, ‘Andreas Gottlob Rudelbach: Kierkegaard’s Idea of an “Orthodox” Theologian’, in Kierkegaard and His Danish Contemporaries: Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 7: tome II (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 303–33. N. F. S. Grundtvig, ‘Den Christne Kirke og den Tydske Theologi’, Nordisk Kirke-Tidende 50 (November 1837): columns 785–96.

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misplaced objectivity of many of these groups, he accepted the authority of the Lutheran doctrinal tradition. Throughout his literature Kierkegaard overtly affirmed the value of particular Christian doctrines, and implicitly assumed their normative status. For example, in his book on Magister Adler, who had claimed to have experienced a private revelation, Kierkegaard complained that Adler had failed to internalize authoritative Christian concepts.51 Inspired by this dimension of Kierkegaard’s work, another type of theological appropriation of Kierkegaard has refused to treat his analysis of subjectivity as an independent foundation of theological reflection, and instead has stressed his fidelity to theological traditions which, they maintain, provided the basic architectonic principles of his work. These expositors and theologians have rejected the notion that Kierkegaard construed Christianity as a natural deepening of human subjectivity. Revelation does not merely enhance generic religious experience, nor does grace perfect nature. Rather, for this group of interpreters, Kierkegaard construed Christianity as a breach with all immanent religiosity, a revelation that invades human existence as an unanticipated gift. Many of Kierkegaard’s early expositors interpreted his work in this way, but had an intensely negative reaction to it. For them, Kierkegaard’s differentiation of ‘religiousness A’ and Christianity was an unfortunate exaggeration. This criticism was often expressed during his initial reception in Scandinavia, which focused on his ‘attack upon Christendom’ and its apparent radical disjunction of Christian faith and ordinary cultural life. Many theologians concluded that this alleged diremption of nature and grace subverted any appreciation of the continuity of God’s creative and redemptive actions. H. L. Martensen himself initiated this interpretation by complaining that Kierkegaard had divorced the Christian ideal from created human nature.52 In later decades, Georg Brandes and K. E. Løgstrup saw Kierkegaard as denigrating the created order and natural human loves in the name of fidelity to the church’s doctrines of sin and redemption.53 Continuing this trajectory the Jewish philosopher-theologian Martin Buber would accuse Kierkegaard of lionizing antisocial attitudes and even promoting a hatred of this world.54 Against such negative interpretations, the early exponents of ‘dialectical theology’ applauded Kierkegaard’s ostensible bifurcation of bourgeois cultural experience and divine revelation. In the early 1930s K. Olesen Larsen, who influenced the Tidehverv movement of spiritual revitalization in Denmark, stressed faith as a disruptive event, an unanticipated encounter with the paradox of the incarnation. Similarly, the early Karl Barth appreciated Kierkegaard for emphasizing the absolute otherness of God, and popularized the celebrated theme of the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity (although Barth would later chastise Kierkegaard for encouraging a pietistic fascination with one’s own spirituality and for insufficiently appreciating the objectivity of Christ’s work of salvation).55 Emil Brunner was even more profoundly influenced by Kierkegaard’s contention that only divine grace could bridge the chasm between God and humanity; Christianity is no religion of God’s immanence in humanity’s religious

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See BA / SKS 15. Hans Lassen Martensen, Om Tro og Viden (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1867). Knud Ejler Løgstrup, Opgør med Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968). Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. R. G. Smith (London: Collins, 1974). Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). Karl Barth, ‘A Thank You and a Bow: Kierkegaard’s Reveille’, trans. Martin Rumscheidt, Canadian Journal of Theology 11 (1965): 3–7.

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experience.56 Brunner thought that he was following Kierkegaard in proposing that the only point of contact between grace and human nature is the experience of despair and the yearning for a reconciliation with God that is beyond one’s own powers. Similarly, the early interpreters of Kierkegaard for the English-speaking world, Walter Lowrie and David Swenson, saw in Kierkegaard’s authorship a healthy differentiation of immanent religiosity and Christianity.57 In their views, Kierkegaard eschewed all attempts to base Christianity upon a generic spirituality, a natural theology, or a general revelation. Some interpreters of Kierkegaard have elaborated his sense of the uniqueness of Christian teachings and have treated him as an expositor of some variety of orthodox Protestant Christianity, usually classic Lutheranism or Lutheranism seasoned with a Reformed emphasis on sanctification. As early as 1880, the Swedish theologian Waldemar Rudin described Kierkegaard as a fellow champion of the traditional Lutheran faith.58 Similarly, Valter Lindström concluded that Kierkegaard was basically an orthodox Lutheran with a suspicion of the church.59 Amy Laura Hall has argued that Kierkegaard’s lofty and daunting description of the ideal of Christ-like love is intended to trigger a sense of incapacity and a receptivity to grace.60 Holmes Hartshorne has similarly contended that Kierkegaard, like a good Lutheran, focused on justification by grace and ruled out any self-initiated process of salvation.61 Heiko Schulz has interpreted Kierkegaard’s remarks about ‘governance’ as an effort to elucidate the traditional theme of divine providence.62 Murray Rae has read Kierkegaard as a precursor of Karl Barth’s Christocentrism, and his conviction that faith is not an actualization of natural human capacities, but is rather a disruptive gift of grace.63 Extending this tradition, Glenn Kirkconnell has ascribed to Kierkegaard the view that the cultivation of Socratic subjectivity is a preparatory pedagogy that should lead to a sense of spiritual inadequacy and a consequent receptivity to God’s reconciling grace.64 Other theologians who see Kierkegaard as an elucidator of Christian doctrines disagree about exactly whose set of doctrines he was actually clarifying. Such interpreters are suspicious of the claim that Kierkegaard’s theological sensibilities were basically Lutheran. Vernard Eller proposed that Kierkegaard’s sensibilities reflected the Anabaptist enthusiasm for Christ-like radical discipleship and the church as a gathered community of committed believers.65 Bradley Dewey also focused on Kierkegaard’s valorization of the imitation of Christ, but linked this with the holiness movement.66 Christopher Barnett has situated Kierkegaard in the spirituality of Pietism, and behind that in the devotion of the medieval Rhenish and Flemish mystics.67 David Law, however, locates Kierkegaard in the

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63 64 65 66 67

Emil Brunner, Der Mensch in Widerspruch: Die christliche Lehre vom wahren und vom wirklichen Menschen (Zurich: Zwingli, 1937). David Swenson, Something about Kierkegaard (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Press, 1941). Waldemar Rudin, Sören Kierkegaards Person och författarskap (Uppsala: A. Nilsson, 1880). Valter Lindström, Stadiernas teologi: En Kierkegaard-studie (Lund: Gleerup, 1943). Amy Laura Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). M. Holmes Hartshorne, Kierkegaard, Godly Deceiver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Heiko Schulz, ‘Kierkegaard on Providence and Foreknowledge. A Critical Account’, in Aneignung und Reflexion, II. Studien zur Philosophie und Theologie Søren Kierkegaards. Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 28 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 291–307. Murray Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology (London: Continuum, 2010). Glenn Kirkconnell, Kierkegaard on Sin and Salvation (London: Continuum, 2010). Vernard Eller, Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). Bradley R. Dewey, The New Obedience: Kierkegaard on Imitating Christ (Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1968). Christopher B. Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

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negative theology tradition, for his negation of positive divine predicates makes openness to God possible.68 Kierkegaard’s possible affinities with the Catholic tradition have also received much attention. Kierkegaard’s fondness for the Epistle of James and his reservations about any one-dimensional emphasis of grace immediately caught the attention of Catholic writers. Theodor Haecker69 and Heinrich Roos70 maintained that Kierkegaard’s valorization of works of love and his conviction that authentic Christianity requires detachment from ordinary secular goods were symptomatic of an unacknowledged Catholic tendency in his life and thought. In the first half of the twentieth century some of the pioneers of the nouvelle théologie like Erich Przywara, Romano Guardini and Henri de Lubac used Kierkegaard to emphasize the need for sincere inwardness.71 A few decades later Louis Dupré argued that the synergistic theme of the individual’s free acceptance of grace and the exhortation to imitate Christ the prototype show strong Catholic leanings.72 More recently Jack Mulder has suggested that Kierkegaard’s description of mature love for God in terms of mutual delight and reciprocity exhibits a Catholic sensibility,73 a view echoed by Joshua Furnal.74 Lee C. Barrett75 and Daphne Hampson have claimed that Kierkegaard’s theological vision actually represents an option that is neither stereotypically Protestant nor Catholic, but is rather a combination of Catholic natural desire for God and Protestant unanticipated revelation.76

VI. KIERKEGAARD AS A THEOLOGIAN OF GRACE PERFECTING NATURE (REVELATION FULFILLING SUBJECTIVITY) Other theologians have detected in Kierkegaard’s authorship a more complementary relation of human subjectivity apart from grace and the objective givenness of revelation. For most of these interpreters, revelation (although potentially offensive) does mesh with natural human yearnings. For example, Gregor Malantschuk proposed that although Kierkegaard in some contexts stresses the utterly unanticipated nature of the incarnation as the revelation of God, in other contexts he describes that revelation as the appropriate resolution to the issue of the individual’s already existing yearning for forgiveness.77 Similarly, Paul Sponheim, while pointing to a ‘diastatic’ moment in Kierkegaard’s literature in which God’s self-revelation is a disruption of natural human propensities, stresses a ‘synthetic’ moment in which the spectacle of God’s humility satisfies a desire inherent in created human nature.78 68 69 70

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David R. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Theodor Haecker, Der Begriff der Wahrheit bei Sören Kierkegaard (Innsbruck: Brenner, 1932). Heinrich Roos, Søren Kierkegaard and Catholicism, trans. Richard Brackett (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1954). Erich Przywara, Das Geheimnis Kierkegaards (Munich: Verlag von R. Oldenbourg, 1929). Romano Guardini, Die Kirche des Herrn (Würzburg: Werkbund-Verlag, 1965). Henri de Lubac, Le Drame de l’humanisme athée (Paris: Spes, 1944). Louis Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963). Jack Mulder, Jr, Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). Joshua Furnal, Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Lee C. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013). Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: An Exposition and Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Gregor Malantschuk, Dialektik og Eksistens hos Søren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzel, 1968). Paul Sponheim, Kierkegaard on Christ and Christian Coherence (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).

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Some authors have even put Kierkegaard’s discussion of subjectivity to an apologetic purpose, trying to show how Christianity’s ability to satisfy a yearning for selfactualization that is inherent in human nature makes the faith plausible. In this view, Kierkegaard’s various stages of life all possess internal tensions which require resolution; this instability motivates a dialectical progression from inadequate forms of subjectivity to more adequate ones, with Christianity as the ultimate culmination of the process. According to Arnold Come, the desire to become self-integrated and self-transparent generates a non-necessary dialectic that finds its telos in Christianity. The polarities that characterize existence in the world are eventually reconciled in faith; Christianity is the fulfilment of the restlessness and yearning that are structural features of human life.79 A similar tendency to see Kierkegaard’s authorship as an example of grace perfecting (or harmonizing with) human nature is evident in the current discussion of Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christian love. Against Anders Nygren’s juxtaposition of natural eros and Christian agape, M. Jamie Ferriera has argued that Kierkegaard does not dichotomize natural human loves and Christian love.80 Rather than ruling out ordinary preferential loves, neighbour love stabilizes and chastens the intrinsic need to love and be loved. Although agape cannot be deduced from natural loves nor is it the culmination of their development, natural love is compatible with neighbour love. In similar ways, Arne Grøn81 and Pia Søltoft82 have pointed to the compatibility of Christian love with the intersubjective structure of the self. Closely related to this question of the compatibility of nature and grace is the issue of the possible motivations for adopting the Christian life. Countless theologians have suggested that Kierkegaard was an extreme voluntarist, whose ‘leap of faith’ was a criterionless decision, unconstrained by ordinary motivations. This was the classic existentialist reading of Kierkegaard, which was reinvigorated by Alasdair MacIntyre in the 1980s.83 But by the 1990s many theologians and philosophers of religion were defending Kierkegaard against the charges of irrationality and were suggesting that a pragmatic justification for faith can be given. M. Jamie Ferreira84 and C. Stephen Evans85 have argued that although the desires and passions that constitute Christianity cannot be proven to be necessary for human flourishing, according to Kierkegaard they do constitute an intelligible and rationally defensible way of living. Given the presence of certain desires and concerns in an individual, the life of faith does make sense. Similarly, Steven Emmanuel has described faith as a paradigm shift that seeks to interpret and regulate an individual’s passional dynamics; pragmatic reasons can be given for finding the Christian life to be attractive.86 These authors agree that the superiority of Christianity to other life options cannot be proven, but that the adoption of Christianity can be defended, given the cultivation of the appropriate sorts of yearnings.

79

80 81 82 83 84 85

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Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering Myself (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997). M. Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Arne Grøn, Subjektivetet og negativitet: Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1997). Pia Søltoft, Svimmelhedens Etik (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2000). Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). M. Jamie Ferreira, Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). C. Stephen Evans, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Steven M. Emmanuel, Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).

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CONCLUSION As we have seen, Kierkegaard responded to a variety of theological movements in his environment, adopting aspects of some, modifying others and vehemently rejecting still others. In all cases these trajectories were transformed in the crucible of his authorship, reappearing in new guises. Because of this multiplicity of influences, Kierkegaard’s theological writings were complex, exhibiting traces of every movement that had affected him. Consequently, subsequent theologians of many different stripes, who were themselves heirs of various nineteenth-century traditions, could find something of value in his literature. Those who continue to root theology in religious subjectivity can appeal to Kierkegaard’s valorization of pathos and his criticism of passionless orthodoxy. From this perspective, the continuities from Schleiermacher through Kierkegaard to the phenomenology of religious experience are striking. Those who see ‘religiousness A’ as a prolegomenon to Christianity are right that for Kierkegaard Christianity does satisfy deep human yearnings. However, those theologians who stress the otherness of God can appeal to Kierkegaard’s protestations that God’s type of love is offensive to ordinary human sensibilities and that God remains totally ‘other’. From this perspective the line from Protestant orthodoxy through Kierkegaard to the early Karl Barth is obvious. Moreover, those who see grace as perfecting nature can legitimately appeal to passages in Kierkegaard in which he implicitly distinguishes the two without divorcing them. From this perspective the chief trajectory from Kierkegaard’s work leads to certain proponents of the nouvelle théologie. Furthermore, those theologians who regard theology as the articulation of the grammar of faith can legitimately point to Kierkegaard’s reliance upon the givenness of authoritative Christian concepts. From this perspective the true heirs of Kierkegaard are the ‘post-liberals’. Finally, those who do theology deconstructively and/or rhetorically can appeal to Kierkegaard’s sensitivity to the performative function of language and its indeterminacy. Here the true descendants of Kierkegaard are poststructuralists like John Caputo. This superabundance of appropriations of Kierkegaard’s thought inevitably raises the question of their legitimacy. This is a daunting issue, for each interpretative tendency can point to some aspect of Kierkegaard’s literature for a plausible justification. Each one does elaborate a particular aspect of Kierkegaard’s complex authorship in which divergent theological themes revolve around one another in complex and shifting patterns. Perhaps each of these various appropriations captures some dimension of the Dane’s multifaceted theological vision. Rather than being mutually exclusive, these construals of Kierkegaard may be complementary, even though they cannot be synthesized into a cohesive meta-interpretation. The most faithful interpretation of Kierkegaard’s authorship may be the one that reflects the tensions among its multiple appropriations, and the tensions within its pages.

FURTHER READING Barnett, Christopher B., and Peter Šajda. ‘Catholicism: Finding Inspiration and Provocation in Kierkegaard’. In A Companion to Kierkegaard, edited by Jon Stewart, 237–50. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015. Schulz, Heiko. ‘From Barth to Tillich: Kierkegaard and the Dialectical Theologians’, In A Companion to Kierkegaard, edited by Jon Stewart, 209–22. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015.

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Stewart, Jon, ed. Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: Tome I: German Protestant Theology. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 10: tome I. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Stewart, Jon, ed. Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: Tome II: Anglophone and Scandinavian Protestant Theology. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 10: tome II. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Stewart, Jon, ed. Kierkegaard’s Influence on Theology: Tome III: Catholic and Jewish Theology. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 10: tome III. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012.

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Key Doctrinal Themes

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CHAPTER TEN

Trinity: A Concept Ubiquitous Yet Unthematized PAUL MARTENS

INTRODUCTION Søren Kierkegaard affirmed the triune nature of God, of that there is no doubt. What exactly this claim means, however, remains decidedly undecided. Most secondary commentary on the Trinity in Kierkegaard’s thought is cryptic and allusive and not particularly illuminating. For example, Murray Rae suggests that Kierkegaard ‘frames his thought in Trinitarian terms’ without further development,1 while Sylvia Walsh claims that the Trinity is not an organizing principle in Kierkegaard’s thought because it is an individual’s ‘God-relationship’ that is ‘the lens through which the Trinity is encountered and known in human existence’.2 David Law argues that there is ‘no discussion of the relationship between the Second Person and the other Persons of the Trinity’,3 while Michael Plekon has rather energetically claimed that Kierkegaard’s theology is ‘trinitarian, informed by the communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit with each other and with us. Creation, redemption and sanctification are inextricably linked with each other as are the three Persons and their total saving action for us.’4 Of course, the particular statements reiterated above that seem to talk past one another are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Yet, what they all seem to imply in one way or another is the generally assumed and occasionally stated position among theologians that Kierkegaard accepted the basic what of traditional Christian theology – the creeds, Scripture and so on, including ‘the traditional attributes and triune nature of God’5 – and was primarily concerned with the how, the subjective, the existential expression of Christian life. That is to say that, in most theological engagements with Kierkegaard’s thought, the Trinity as a theological category is perceived to be a matter that belongs to the what and, therefore, is simply acknowledged and left behind as attention turns to the how, the ‘God-relationship’ Walsh noted above.

1 2

3 4

5

Murray Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 3. Sylvia Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 53. David R. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 182. Michael Plekon, ‘Kierkegaard the Theologian: The Roots of His Theology in Works of Love’, in Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, ed. George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992), 2–18 [8]. Sylvia Walsh, ‘Kierkegaard’s Theology ’, in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 292–308 [296].

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If this preliminary conclusion is true, one might also assume that discussion of the Trinity is relatively absent in Kierkegaard’s corpus. This is, in reality, the case: references to the Trinity are exceedingly rare both in Kierkegaard’s published corpus and in his unpublished journals and papers. Further, even these references are loaded with theological ambivalence. Yet, there is more to say about the Trinity in Kierkegaard. While Kierkegaard does not provide a classic, ready-made summary of the Trinity in terms of the interrelations among the three Persons of the Trinity, he does occasionally engage in reflections that reveal how he understands the three Persons of the Trinity working together in relation to humans. On the basis of these latter examples, the purpose of this chapter is to argue that Kierkegaard is properly understood as Trinitarian not because he assumes the Trinity – though it is a relatively safe assumption – but because he embraces and develops a Trinitarian theology in an idiosyncratic manner. To that end, the argument takes three steps. It (1) sketches Kierkegaard’s strong reaction to the Trinitarian thought attributed to Hegel that serves as the backdrop for Kierkegaard’s theological agenda and emphases, (2) traces the contours of the Trinity in economic terms as outlined in Kierkegaard’s published and unpublished writings, and (3) in the conclusion suggests a reading of Kierkegaard’s thought within his own theological framework that may allow for attributing to Kierkegaard some notion of the ontological or immanent Trinity.

I. AMBIVALENCE ABOUT THE CONCEPT OF TRINITY Much has been made in many contexts about Kierkegaard’s contentious relationship with Hegel. In this context, I would like to highlight merely one example of the familiar antiHegelian refrains that punctuate Kierkegaard’s corpus because of the light it sheds on the topic at hand. Reflecting on the personhood of God, Kierkegaard jotted the following in a late journal entry: For a long, long time the race wearied itself with the question of the personhood of God. If only it could be conceptualized, they thought, then the question of the Trinity could be put aside. What happened? Along came Hegel and Hegelianism. They understood the matter better: they proved that God is personal simply because he is triune. Well thanks, that is a lift. All this about the trinity was shadow-boxing; it was the old logical trilogy (thesis-antithesis-synthesis), and the ‘personhood’ which resulted from it was something like the X with which they began in those days, since they thought that if they could only get the personhood of God conceptualized, the matter of the trinity could be put aside.6 Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel in this instance reveals at least one worry about the Trinity, namely, that philosophically conceptualizing the Trinity renders the Trinity personally, if not theologically, irrelevant. Or, to use the language of Fear and Trembling, conceptualizing the Trinity in a Hegelian manner essentially yields an interpretation of the personhood of God as an ‘invisible vanishing point’.7 Essentially, what Kierkegaard challenges here is the explanatory power attributed to the Trinity as it serves to unfold

6 7

JP 2:1615, pp. 224–5 / SKS 23, NB15:96, p. 68. See FT, 68.

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Hegel’s logic in theological terms. Whether expressed by Hegel specifically or by Danish Hegelians like H. L. Martensen, what Kierkegaard is reacting to is the sentiment expressed succinctly in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: When we say ‘God in his eternal universality is the one who distinguishes himself, determines himself, posits an other to himself, and likewise sublates the distinction, thereby remaining present to himself, and is spirit only through this process of being brought forth’, then the understanding enters in and counts one, two, three. Oneness is to begin with wholly abstract. But the three ones are expressed more profoundly when they are defined as persons.8 For Kierkegaard, the fundamental order is problematic – the Trinity is determined to be necessary based on a triad logic because the category of ‘the one’ is ‘a poor category, the wholly abstract unit’.9 If one can arrive at the Trinity through a dialectic logic alone, according to Kierkegaard, then one has a self-referential and conceptually reconciled or completed understanding of Trinity that exists prior to encountering God, which is also to say that the Persons of the Trinity would in no way be qualified or defined by the Trinity revealed in Scripture and encountered in one’s life. And, if that is the case, then the matter of the Trinity can ‘be put aside’ or, perhaps even more accurately, it can be the philosophical lens through which one makes sense of and sorts out, as a ‘professor of philosophy . . . without a life impression’10 would, the abstruse personhood of the biblical God. Rather than proceed in this manner, Kierkegaard begins at the personal encounter with the God-relationship. In this beginning, he attempts to sidestep speculation and to step away from conceptualizing the relationship in an a priori fashion. Effectively, therefore, Kierkegaard begins with the Trinity in economic terms – in terms that specify the work that is done by the Persons of the Trinity in relation to individuals – and, for this reason, Kierkegaard strongly prefers to use the personal and scripturally rooted terms like God, Father, Jesus,11 Son and Holy Spirit, and very rarely deigns to use the term Trinity as a constructive theological concept.

II. EMBRACING AN ECONOMIC TRINITY Sylvia Walsh is right to claim that the God-relationship is the lens through which the Trinity is encountered and known in human existence.12 But, to what end is the Godrelationship oriented? In short, the telos is upbringing in Christianity – discipleship, imitation of Christ – and ‘God is the educator’.13 Therefore, when one does find the 8

9 10 11

12 13

G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One-Volume Edition: The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter C. Hodgson and trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 426–7. Ibid., 427. JP 2:1615, pp. 224–5 / SKS 23, NB15:96, p. 68. The case of Jesus Christ provides the obvious exception to my general claim that Kierkegaard avoids impersonal conceptual terms to capture the Persons of the Trinity. In this case, however, he appropriates and critically cross-examines the conceptual term God-man, the term also used by Luther, Hegel and Martensen. In the case of the God-man, however, the term is used to highlight the paradoxicality of God’s existence in history. That is, the explanatory power of the concept of the God-man in Kierkegaard’s corpus is primarily negative or critical. Walsh, Kierkegaard, 53. WL, 377.

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occasional grouping of the three Persons of the Trinity together in Kierkegaard’s corpus, one finds them embedded in an account of the work of God in the interwoven economies of justification and sanctification. Taking a closer look at two examples – one in the published corpus; one in the unpublished journals and papers – illuminates how important the economic Trinity is for Kierkegaard’s understanding of what it means to live Christianly.

Works of Love The clearest and most succinct account of Kierkegaard’s Trinitarian imagination appears in the opening pages of Works of Love, published under his own name in 1847. In the invocational prayer organized around the theme of love, Kierkegaard introduces the three Persons of the Trinity – under the nomenclature of ‘O Eternal Love’ – with name, identity in relation to love and economic role: 1. ‘God of love’ – source of love; love itself – gave everything so one can rest in God; 2. ‘Savior and Redeemer’ – revelation of love – gave himself to save all; 3. ‘Spirit of love’ – takes nothing for itself – reminds of love-sacrifice; reminds to love as one is loved and to love neighbour as self.14 The language used to identify the First Person of the Trinity overlaps that of ‘the almighty Father’, the unchanging ‘Father of lights’ that gives good and perfect gifts,15 the image that crystallizes some of Kierkegaard’s earliest and latest reflections on the consistent action and character of God. Further, it is in this context that Kierkegaard suggests, from a different perspective, how God is the first and last word in the task of becoming a self, the task that is only fulfilled when ‘the self rests transparently in the power that established it’.16 The names used to identify the Second Person of the Trinity reflect the salvific role of Jesus Christ. What may be surprising here, however, is the absence of two emphases that are developed in great detail in other parts of Kierkegaard’s corpus. First, the notion of paradox implicit in the God-man that dominates Philosophical Fragments and Practice in Christianity is passed over in virtual silence; second, the role of Jesus as teacher and prototype, the category so important in Kierkegaard’s later critical texts,17 is only taken up with reference to the Spirit.18 One can only guess why these familiar emphases are absent in this context. If pressed, however, I would venture that their absence is related to the unique addressee of this literary fragment. In Works of Love Christ is the object of praise as the one ‘who revealed what love is, you our Savior and Redeemer, who gave yourself in order to save all’. When Kierkegaard expounds upon Christ as ‘paradox’ and ‘teacher and prototype’, he addresses his usual Danish audience in the mood of exhortation. Relative to the first two Persons, the Spirit is given short shrift – the relation to love is negatively defined (‘who take nothing of your own’) and the positive role attributed to 14 15 16 17 18

WL, 3–4. See, for example, EUD, 32–48. See also Jas 1.17-22. SUD, 14. See, for example, FSE, 53–70; and JFY, 145–213. In the text of Works of Love itself, however, the theme of Christ as prototype is very present. See, for example, WL, 288.

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the Spirit is to point to the Second Person and to remind the believer of his responsibility (‘love as he is loved and his neighbor as himself ’). It will be several years yet – well after the publication of Works of Love – before the Spirit is ascribed a more robust and complementary role in giving the good and perfect gifts necessary for the task of loving the neighbour.19 Works of Love is what Kierkegaard called a ‘Christian deliberation’. Therefore, he was very clear to state that it was a deliberation ‘not about love but about works of love’.20 This emphasis on work is carried throughout the Trinitarian prayer and, in so doing, Kierkegaard provides his reader with at least a translucent window into his understanding of how the complementary Persons of the Trinity each play a unique and distinct role in educating one in the work of love. And, even though this window into Kierkegaard’s theological imagination is most illuminating, it is but one aperture presented for the particular purpose of praising the works of love displayed by the three Persons of the Trinity.

Journals and Papers While one ought to be wary about attributing too much authority to Kierkegaard’s unpublished notes and journal entries, they can be very useful for catching glimpses of what he was thinking, even if only momentarily. Such a Trinitarian entry appears in his journals, likely written several years after Works of Love.21 In the entry, Kierkegaard acknowledges the commonly held assumption that it is Christ who leads one to God and then upends it on the basis of Jn 6.45.22 In this later narration, the God-relationship again begins with the Father, proceeds to the Son and then to the Spirit in an idiosyncratic manner worth articulating in some detail, noting Kierkegaard’s nomenclature, the nature of the relationship between God and the human, and a brief description of the reason for a transition between the Persons of the Trinity serially encountered (in italics). Phase 1: God as Father; simple child-relationship (child speaks to God as to a nursemaid) When a certain point of maturity is reached, God becomes too infinitely exalted (abstract); God directs to the Son. Phase 2: Son as mediator; God is Father through mediator (a) Mediator as prototype; youthful simplicity and daring of the striver that sees prototype as peer (unaware of prototype’s infinite sublimity) When a certain point of maturity is reached, the prototype becomes infinitely exalted and the youth recognizes her presumptuousness; Son directs to the Spirit. (b) Mediator as atoner (but the atoner ‘must not supplant’ the prototype) Phase 3: Spirit as helper Only when the believer reaches this point in the economies of salvation and sanctification does the Spirit lead to the Son who leads to the Father.

19 20 21 22

FSE, 71–87. WL, 3. JP 2:1432, pp. 137–8 / SKS 25, NB27:23, pp. 140–2. ‘It is written in the prophets, “And they shall all be taught by God.” Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me’.

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In the end, the fundamental principle of the God-relationship is boldly stated twice: ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’ – this, after all, ‘is the law for all true love’.23 What Kierkegaard seems to be driving at in this later reflection is a rather Lutheran understanding of Jesus Christ in relation to the other Persons of the Trinity, but one in which the pedagogical and normative roles of the Son are emphasized – as one matures, one becomes aware of and convicted by the prototype. In turn, one turns to the Son as atoner for justification at the same time that she holds the Son as prototype. Only at this point does the Christian turn to the Spirit as helper in the process of sanctification (that is, in the task of imitating the Son).24 And, the decrease repeated in this later entry also evokes the stronger language of ‘dying to’ employed in For Self-Examination that Kierkegaard introduces to qualify the help that the Spirit has to offer: ‘If we are to live with him, then we must die with him. First death – then life.’25 But, then comes the life-giving Holy Spirit. And the gifts of faith, hope and love that the Spirit gives as helper are gifts that find their source in the Father so that Christians may ‘join with God’,26 so to speak, in loving the neighbour. Before moving forward, it is important to recognize that, throughout this journal entry, God’s majesty is consistently defined as self-deference and self-giving in opposition to distance or domination. While this action or disposition is developed through an articulation of the increasingly intimate roles of the three Persons of the Trinity in relation to human beings, Kierkegaard also pregnantly suggests that it is ‘inseparable from [God’s] being’.27 ***** In the subsequent section, a brief summary of Kierkegaard’s position will be presented and extrapolated to indicate that Kierkegaard may reveal enough about the interrelationships between the three Persons in the economies of justification and sanctification to also indicate the ontological shape of the immanent Trinity. In fact, the concluding argument is already foreshadowed immediately above, but, before getting to that discussion, it is important to acknowledge what is notoriously absent in Kierkegaard’s reflections in relation to their historical and cultural context: community and history. In short, Kierkegaard’s Trinitarian reflections self-consciously remain limited to the hidden relationship between God and an individual. Emphatically, ‘this journey of discovery of God is an inland journey’.28 Kierkegaard’s steadfast position on this matter is not an accident; Hegelian theology again haunts the background. Specifically, Kierkegaard desperately wants to avoid collapsing ontological and economic accounts of the Trinity in any way that human community becomes necessarily and ontologically identified with the reconciling work of God. As Hegel unfolds his Trinitarian logic, the separation of humanity from God, represented in Jesus, is overcome by the Spirit in the individual, in the church and then in ethical life (Sittlichkeit) – ‘Thus it is in the ethical realm that the reconciliation of religion with worldliness and actuality comes about and is accomplished.’29

23 24

25 26 27 28 29

JP 2:1432, pp. 137–8 / SKS 25, NB27:23, pp. 140–2. M. Jamie Ferreira rightly describes Kierkegaard’s formulation of the Lutheran dual commitment to works and grace, law and love, and striving and gift as ‘grace, humiliation, grace, and then striving born of gratitude’. See Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s ‘Works of Love’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 20–1. FSE, 81. FSE, 85. JP 2:2432, pp. 137–8 / SKS 25, NB27:23, pp. 140–2. JP 2:1451, p. 154 / SKS 26, NB34:30, p. 341. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 484.

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Rather than follow Hegel in this direction, Kierkegaard moves in precisely the opposite direction, in the direction of a collision between individual upbuilding and worldly success, whether found in the church or the state. In Works of Love, the Trinitarian prayer is immediately followed by a chapter – the first and orienting chapter – focused on the hiddenness of love’s life and, correspondingly, the recognizability of love’s fruit only by those who love.30 In his later published and unpublished writings, it is not an overstatement to conclude that the only thing that may count as love’s recognizability is suffering because ‘being loved of God is suffering, continual suffering . . . with the Spirit’s testimony that this is God’s love, this is what it is to dare to love God’.31

CONCLUSION: IMAGINING THE IMMANENT TRINITY? Kierkegaard is known for radically holding on to ‘the changelessness of God’, to God as ‘the Eternal’, in the midst of life’s fluctuations.32 Such language might be taken to suggest a reification of God as a heavenly entity unconcerned with the temporal mess in which humanity finds itself. Yet, it is quite the opposite – it is precisely because God is unchanging that God is moved in love, infinite love, to give everything and spare nothing so that humans might find rest in God.33 In the above, I have attempted to draw attention to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the way in which the three Persons of the Trinity work together in the economies of justification and sanctification – each economy exhibiting how for Kierkegaard grace leads to works, and how faith is active in love – to express God’s unchanging love. In this context, I have essentially limited the discussion to the rare occurrences in which all three Persons of the Trinity are present and, therefore, have tried to refrain from overdetermining my argument by texts in which Persons of the Trinity are treated individually or in isolation (recognizing, of course, that a larger, systemic treatment of the Trinity would necessarily need to account for all of those in a synthetic manner as well).34 Even within these limitations, however, the composite picture of Kierkegaard’s Trinity that emerges is consistent in at least three ways: 1. Each Person of the Trinity is united in character (love) and purpose (Christian upbringing). 2. Each Person of the Trinity plays a different role in Christian upbringing. 3. The Father and the Spirit never relate to one another directly in Christian upbringing but refer only to the Son. It is doubtful that this last comment constitutes a Filioque controversy of a different kind, but it is certainly indicative of how the economic interpretative lens profoundly shapes Kierkegaard’s discussion of the three Persons of the Trinity. Within this restricted purview and Kierkegaard’s apophatic tendencies,35 however, there are clues that may also

30 31 32 33 34

35

WL, 5–16. JP 2:1433, p. 139 / SKS 25, NB27:39, p. 152. See, for example, TM, 263–81, TM, 268. Admittedly, I have also allowed For Self-Examination to play a special supplemental role in this discussion because it could be argued, as J. Aaron Simmons does, that the book as a whole displays a decidedly Trinitarian theology. See ‘Kierkegaard and Pentecostal Philosophy’, in Kierkegaard’s God and the Good Life, ed. Stephen Minister, J. Aaron Simmons and Michael J. Strawser (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 227–51 [234]. See David R. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 162–81.

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point towards his unstated assumptions about the ontological or immanent Trinity. After all, it is in the opening prayer of Works of Love that Kierkegaard himself allows the apparently overreaching claim ‘in heaven no work can be pleasing unless it is a work of love’.36 To that end, I will close with the following extrapolation of Kierkegaard’s theology that just might justify Plekon’s enthusiastic assertions about Kierkegaard’s vision of Trinitarian communion. To begin, it is clear that (1) God is love. Therefore, (a) everything that Kierkegaard ascribes to love in this context can be ascribed to God. Yet, it is also clear that (a1) each of the Persons of the Trinity can also be described as love. For example, ‘in the divine sense’, ‘Christ was Love'; ‘he loved by virtue of the divine conception of what love is.’37 Further, (2) love has a need – self-renunciation.38 This is declared in the prayer and displayed in the self-effacing actions of the journal entry. This characteristic of love is not expressed only in relation to human beings but, by definition, in relation to all persons. Finally, (3) Christian love is ‘sheer action’, that is, it is never satisfied or completed. To love as sheer action has economic expressions: in the case of the Father, to be the spring that continually searches for the thirsty;39 in the case of Christ, ‘to be one with the Father’ in fulfilling the Law;40 in the case of the Holy Spirit, to take away corruption and to give life.41 On the basis of these few observations, it is possible to imagine that the character of God’s love for humans must necessarily be expressed in some form among the Persons of the Trinity as well. If love for each other is in any way consistent with love for humans, the Trinity would have to be something like a community of Persons continually engaged in humble self-giving. Beyond this observation, however, not much more can be said – Kierkegaard is clear what gifts humans need and therefore considerable specification is possible in terms of God’s action in relations with human persons; it is entirely unclear what gift-giving among the Persons of the Trinity might look like without reference to humans because divine love in Kierkegaard’s thought has no need other than to give itself and our understanding of ‘divine love itself ’ is already fundamentally inflected by our own self-reference, including both our needs and gifts received. Whatever the case may be, it is safe to conclude that even if a Kierkegaardian account of the ontological or immanent Trinity can be suggested, it is merely a hypothetical extension of the works of love expressed through the economic Trinity because works of love ‘essentially cannot be described’.42

FURTHER READING Law, David R. Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Martens, Paul. ‘The Emergence of the Holy Spirit in Kierkegaard’s Thought: Critical Theological Developments’. In International Kierkegaard Commentary: For Self-Examination and Judge For Yourself!, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 199–222. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002.

36 37 38 39 40 41 42

WL, 4. WL, 109–10. WL, 4. TM, 281. WL, 99. FSE, 87. WL, 3.

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Minister, Stephen, J. Aaron Simmons and Michael J. Strawser. Kierkegaard’s God and the Good Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017. Rae, Murray. Kierkegaard and Theology. London: T&T Clark, 2010. Walsh, Sylvia. Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Divine Attributes: Kierkegaard’s Broodings on the Godhead JOEL D. S. RASMUSSEN

INTRODUCTION Begin talking about God’s omnipotence, omniscience and maximal goodness – which are, according to William Rowe, ‘the three divine perfections that constitute the core of the classical concept of God in Western civilization’1 – and one soon often encounters the heady but unsolvable metaphysical and ethical puzzles of classical theism. Can God create a rock so heavy that God cannot lift it? Is something good because God wills it, or does God will it because it is good? Does God know whether any given event will occur before that event actually occurs, and if so is such divine foreknowledge consistent with divine and/or human freedom? And so on and so on. Søren Kierkegaard tended to regard speculative questions of this sort as impertinent. They are unanswerable, and in any case make little difference for how one lives one’s life, or indeed how one relates to God personally. It goes against the very grain of Kierkegaard’s own edifying mode of reflection and writing to attempt any speculative exposition or systematic inventory of the defining characteristics that are said to be uniquely applicable to the divine being. Moreover, for Kierkegaard, deliberating over philosophical abstractions strays rather far afield from the Christological heart of the Christian conception of God and the centrality of what he called an individual’s own ‘God relationship’. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that Kierkegaard believed such notions as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence, and so on pertained only to some speculative ‘God of the philosophers’ and not the God of the Christian tradition. For he knew full well from his university years as a theology candidate that prominent works in Christian doctrine – from the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas to the Glaubenslehre of Friedrich Schleiermacher – devoted entire sections to the elucidation of the meaning and significance of the divine attributes. And earlier still, while preparing for his confirmation, he would have memorized the list of God’s attributes that he encountered in the catechetical Lærebog by Nicolai Edinger Balle authorized for use in the Danish church: God is Spirit, eternal, changeless, omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise, omnipresent, good, compassionate, holy, just, truthful and faithful. Now, Balle’s compact inventory of 1

William L. Rowe, ‘Divine Power, Goodness, and Knowledge’, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, ed. William J. Wainwright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15–34 [32].

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divine attributes never appears as such in Kierkegaard’s writings, and Kierkegaard never penned a learned disquisition of the sort one finds in Schleiermacher’s great work either. Nevertheless, as a Christian author, Kierkegaard held both inchoate assumptions and express convictions about God that were profoundly shaped by Christian doctrine, and across his published writings and his journals alike every one of the attributes listed above appears overtly in insightful (and sometimes inventive) connections. As this chapter will make clear, the way in which Kierkegaard writes about the divine attributes regularly underscores the fact that his point is never to solve speculative metaphysical puzzles – nothing could be less Kierkegaardian than that. Rather, when Kierkegaard touches upon one or another of the divine attributes, he consistently has spiritual edification in mind – that is, the inward deepening of his own and his reader’s relationship to God. In what follows, I first address the emergence of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the doctrinal treatments of the divine attributes he encountered as a student. I then take some soundings from representative passages in Kierkegaard’s writings to demonstrate how these doctrinal elements shape his own reflections on the nature of God. And finally I consider how Kierkegaard continually returns to discussions of the divine attributes as conceived in the Christian tradition – and especially the affirmation that God is love (1 Jn 4.8, 16) – and how in his turn he inflects his writings in such a way that his reader might reflect anew and more clearly on the significance of his or her own relationship to God.

I. THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES IN KIERKEGAARD’S CATECHESIS AND THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION Growing up in a pious Lutheran household in the first half of the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard would have been instructed from his earliest days at home, in church and eventually in school, on how God is addressed in prayer, and on how Christians think and speak about God. From the Lord’s Prayer, table prayers, evening prayers, Bible readings and memorization, devotionals, worship services, holidays and family conversations, he learned to speak of God as creator of all that is, as loving Father whose name is hallowed, as Jesus Christ who is teacher and saviour and as Holy Spirit who comforts and helps, among the numerous other symbols of God in church teaching and popular piety. But it was when his father enrolled him at Borgerdydskolen (The School of Civic Virtue) in 1821 that Kierkegaard’s formal theological education began. For there he was required to learn the catechism backwards and forwards and, in fact, ‘to know it by heart’.2 The work authorized for catechetical instruction in Denmark from 1794 until long after Kierkegaard was a schoolboy was the Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til Brug i de danske Skoler (‘Textbook on the evangelical Christian religion for use in Danish schools’) written principally by the pastor, professor of theology and bishop of Zealand, Nicolai Edinger Balle (1744–1816). The very first chapter of Balle’s Lærebog is entitled ‘On God and his Attributes’, and is subdivided into three sections. The first two sections of the chapter address (1) ‘How We Come to Knowledge about God’ (viz. through God’s Word revealed in Scripture), and (2) ‘What Scripture Teaches concerning God in general’ (e.g. that the creator of the world is the one true God, that Scripture

2

Christopher B. Barnett, ‘Nicolai Edinger Balle: The Reception of His Lærebog in Denmark and in Kierkegaard’s Authorship’, in Kierkegaard and His Danish Contemporaries: Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 7: tome II (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 23–40 [24].

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teaches us to know to recognize God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that Father, Son and Holy Spirit participate equally in eternality, power, wisdom and goodness). Catechumens then come to a list enumerating (3) ‘What Scripture Teaches about God’s Being and Attributes’: §1.

God is Spirit [Aand], or an invisible being, who has understanding and free will, but no body or parts. Therefore he cannot be seen by human eyes, and neither can he be depicted in images. (See Jn 4.24; 1 Tim. 1.17.)

§2.

God is eternal [evig], and has neither beginning nor end. He is always changeless [uforanderlig], and remains always the same. (See Ps. 90.2; Ps. 102.27-8; Jas 1.17.)

§3.

God is omnipotent [almægtig], and can do everything he wills without difficulty. But he does only that which is wise and good, for he does not will anything but that alone. (See Ps. 115.3; Jer. 32.17-19.)

§4.

God is omniscient [alvidende], and knows at once whatever has happened, or is happening, or will happen in all future days. Our most secret thoughts are not hidden from him. (See Jn 3:20; Ps. 139.1-3.)

§5.

God is all-wise [alviis], and his decisions always have the best intentions; and he always chooses the best means to carry them out. (See Ps. 104.24; Job 12.13.)

§6.

God is omnipresent [allestedsnærværende], and manifests his power in all things everywhere. He is nowhere distant from his works. (See Ps. 139.7-8; Jer. 23.24.)

§7.

God is good [god], and demonstrates so many blessings towards all his works, which each of them receives, according to its nature, its circumstances or its external state of affairs. (See Ps. 145.9; Acts 14.17.)

§8.

God is compassionate [barmhiertig], and wishes to provide relief in our distress and free us therefrom, in the opportune moment and way, everything as is necessary for our own good. (See Ps. 103.13; 2 Cor. 1.3.)

§9.

God is holy [hellig], and loves the good always, but takes the greatest displeasure in all that is evil. (See Ps. 5.5; 1 Pet. 1.15.)

§10. God is just [retfærdig], and will maintain his laws, all of which benefit us. He will therefore not only reward those who heed him, but punish those who disobey him. (See Exod. 20.5-6; Rom. 2.6.) §11. God is truthful [sanddrue], and never deceives us with false impressions. He is faithful [trofast], and warrants or promises only that which he can and will sustain. (See Num. 23.19; Ps. 33.4.)3 In further chapters, Balle turns to expositions ‘On God’s Works’, ‘On Sin’, ‘On Jesus Christ Our Saviour’, ‘On Conversion and Faith’, ‘On the Fruits of Faith in a Holy Life’, ‘On the Means of Grace’ and ‘On Last Things’. Our concern here, however, is principally with Balle’s initial chapter on the divine attributes. When in subsequent years Kierkegaard began keeping a journal and publishing his upbuilding discourses and pseudonymous works, some of the attributes listed above would, of course, feature more prominently in his writings than others. However, as we shall see in the next section of this chapter, since virtually every attribute listed above

3

Nicolai Edinger Balle, Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til Brug i de danske Skoler (Copenhagen: J. H. Schulz, 1824 [1791]), 12–16; ASKB 183. This abridged translation is my own.

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appears somewhere in Kierkegaard’s writings (whether in his journals and notebooks, or his published writings, or both), it can hardly be gainsaid that Balle’s Lærebog as a primary means of catechesis was an important influence on the precocious student. And if the fact that Kierkegaard only infrequently mentions Balle and his Lærebog by name in his writings strikes us as surprising (Judge William’s ‘notes to Balle’s catechism’ being the one notable instance4), we might bear in mind that the point of a catechism is not to propound a distinctive authorial point of view but rather to communicate the central teachings of a Christian confession. And in this respect, Julia Watkin and Christopher Barnett are surely correct that Kierkegaard believed ‘Balle’s catechism was a tolerable conveyor of “the basic tenets of Lutheran Christianity” ’, even if in its straightforward didactic approach and as an instrument of the establishment it ‘nevertheless failed to grasp the intricacies of both human existence and religious communication’.5 Kierkegaard was confirmed in 1828, graduated from Borgerdydskolen in 1830 and thereafter matriculated at the University of Copenhagen. Concurrent with his move from secondary to tertiary education was a shift in theological sophistication marked by the transition from memorization of a confessional catechism to study and preparation for examinations in critical biblical scholarship, church history and Christian dogmatics. Concerning the latter, in the academic year 1833/4 Kierkegaard attended the lectures of the Danish theologian and politician Henrik Nicolai Clausen (1793–1877).6 Clausen had initially been strongly influenced by rationalism, but a study trip to Berlin in 1818–19 during which he attended Friedrich Schleiermacher’s lectures on dogmatics and dialectics precipitated a break with that approach. Upon his appointment to a professorial chair in Copenhagen in 1820, Clausen took a via media combining elements of Enlightenment rationalism and Lutheran orthodoxy in which he held that while the Bible reveals God’s grace and norms human faith, divine revelation can only be elucidated and faith only actualized through the assistance of reason. As we read in Kierkegaard’s notes to Clausen’s lectures, ‘Dogmatics is biblical, because it develops the content of the Bible; it is philosophical, because it develops the dogmas’ relation to hum. beings’ religious ideas; it is ecclesiastical, because it indicates the particular direction in which the doctrine is found to be developed in a particular society.’7 Kierkegaard’s student notes on Clausen’s lectures are incomplete, but they nonetheless fill the entirety of his ‘Notebook 1’ (headed ‘Lectures on Dogmatics by H. N. Clausen’) and thus run to about eighty pages.8 These pages consist in the main simply of abridged transcripts of Clausen’s lectures, with numerous marginal entries probably inserted at an unknown later date. The section addressing the divine attributes – brief, sketchy and moving rapidly between Danish, Greek and Latin – effectively illustrates Clausen’s claim that dogmatics is a biblical, philosophical and ecclesiastical exercise, for 4 5

6

7 8

EO2, 323 / SKS 3, 305. Barnett, ‘Nicolai Edinger Balle’, 33. The quotation within Barnett’s quotation comes from Julia Watkin, ‘Judge William – A Christian?’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or, Part II, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1995), 113–24 [124]. Clausen’s lectures ran across two semesters, the first beginning in November 1833 and running until the end of March 1834, and the second running from May 1834 and concluding at the end of September 1834. See KJN 3, p. 449 / SKSK 19, p. 8. KJN 3, p. 10 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:3, p. 14. KJN 3, pp. 3–82 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:1–9, pp. 7–85. The editors of Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks comment that it is not known whether Kierkegaard actually attended all the lectures, or whether he simply copied out in his own hand the ‘subscription notes’ taken by transcribers and made available for sale to students. KJN 3, p. 453.

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while (like Balle) he gives biblical proof-texts for each of the attributes in his list, Clausen also references such important figures from ecclesiastical history as Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, Tertullian, Justin Martyr and Gregory Nazianzus, and considers philosophical categories for interpreting the attributes. For example, Kierkegaard’s notes record Clausen’s loose quotation from Augustine’s De Trinitate (On the Trinity) – ‘God is good without quality, great without quantity, creates without needing to, is present without form, is everywhere without place, is sempiternal without time, makes what is mutable without being moved’ – and then in the following line simply stands, ‘via negationis, via eminentiæ, via causalitatis.’9 It is not possible to know from Kierkegaard’s notebook precisely how Clausen expounded these terms, but it is clear that he turned here in his lecture to discuss the three ways in which scholastic theology argued it was possible to speak of the divine attributes. By the via negationis (way of negation) one speaks of God essentially by negating attributes God’s creatures possess (e.g. God is in-finite, un-changing, etc.); by the via eminentiæ (way of removal of limits) one speaks of properties creatures have but which God possesses preeminently (e.g. humans may possess some knowledge, but God is all-knowing) and by the via causalitatis (way of causation) one speaks of God on the model of Thomas Aquinas’s analogy of attribution (e.g. God is Love because God is the cause of all love in the world). Kierkegaard also records, again without comment, Clausen’s discussion of further scholastic terms differentiating attributes internal to God (i.e. ‘the immanent, quiescent, and metaphysical properties’ such as eternity, changelessness and simplicity) from attributes pertaining to God’s relation to the created world (i.e. ‘the moral, operative, and transforming properties’ such as righteousness, holiness, omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence).10 And he closes these notes on the divine attributes (apart from a parenthetical coda with a quotation from Tertullian, and references to Justin Martyr, Gregory of Nazianzus, Pseudo-Dionysius and Origen) by recording Clausen’s discussion of God’s ‘intuitive knowledge, i.e. a knowledge that is instantaneously most distinctly true without discursive reasoning and without ratiocination’, and God’s ‘knowing that is necessary, free, and mediate (concerning future possibles)’.11 Since these lecture notes do little more than record the topics Clausen addressed and some of what he said about them, they reveal little to nothing of what Kierkegaard actually thought about Clausen’s lectures on the divine attributes, or indeed what he thought about the divine attributes themselves. They do at least establish, however, that Kierkegaard became familiar in these years with considerations of the divine attributes that went considerably beyond rote memorization of the catechism and biblical proof-texting. Despite not developing his own thoughts on Clausen’s lectures in ‘Notebook 1’, Kierkegaard was clearly interested in Christian dogmatics as a field of study at this time, for beginning in the summer of 1834 he began a study of the touchstone of modern Protestant theology, the Glaubenslehre (The Christian Faith) by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834).12 We noted above that Clausen had been influenced by Schleiermacher’s theology, so Kierkegaard’s turn to the Glaubenslehre followed naturally as his next step when 9 10 11 12

KJN 3, p. 74 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:9, p. 78. KJN 3, p. 75 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:9, p. 78; see also the editorial notes, KJN 3, p. 484. KJN 3, p. 75 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:9, p. 78. Schleiermacher first published the Glaubenslehre in 1821 but heavily revised this for a second edition published a decade later. The full title is Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt, 2 volumes (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1830–1).

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Clausen’s lectures on dogmatics were wrapping up. Kierkegaard received tutorials on the Glaubenslehre from Clausen’s junior colleague, Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–1884), who within a decade would become a primary target of Kierkegaard’s critique of both Hegelianism and establishment Christendom. For his part, Martensen later remembered Kierkegaard as ‘having an irresistible urge to sophistry, to hair-splitting games, which showed itself at every opportunity and was often tiresome’ but, as George Pattison points out, Kierkegaard’s papers give little evidence of any particularly quarrelsome stance toward Schleiermacher or his theology.13 Kierkegaard’s study notes on the Glaubenslehre run to only about ten pages in the most recent critical edition of his papers. They consist in the main of Danish paraphrases of Schleiermacher’s German, and sometimes simply give an indication of what some section or other of the Glaubenslehre addresses. So, for example, Papir 13:7 reads simply: 2nd [Section] On the div[ine] attributes, which are related to the religious self-consciousn[ess] so far as it expresses the gen[eral] relationship between God and the world. § 50. All attributes which we ascribe to God are to be taken as denoting not something special in God, but only something special in the manner in which the feeling of absolute dependence is to be related to Him.14 This note just reproduces the heading of the second section of the Glaubenslehre, together with the first paragraph of that section, without comment. Yet, there are nonetheless hints that there was much in Schleiermacher’s discussion of the divine attributes that interested Kierkegaard. Schleiermacher addresses the divine attributes under the headings ‘God is Eternal’ (§52),15 ‘God is Omnipresent’ (§53),16 ‘God is Omnipotent’ (§54)17 and ‘God is Omniscient’ (§55)18 and, in an appendix, ‘Some Other Divine Attributes’ (§56), which comprise ‘unity’, ‘infinity’ and ‘simplicity’.19 Along the way, Schleiermacher outlines what he takes to be dialectical relationships between these attributes (and others) as well as the ways in which the attributes bear on the human consciousness of absolute dependence upon God. Kierkegaard’s sketchy notes do not reproduce Schleiermacher’s organizational structure, but do evidence his having thought through Schleiermacher’s discussion of divine changelessness (Papir 13:8), simplicity (Papir 13:8 and Papir 13:12), eternity (Papir 13:8 and Papir 13:9), omnipresence (Papir 13:8), immensity (Papir 13:9), infinity (Papir 13:9 and Papir 13: 12), omnipotence (Papir 13:10), omniscience (Papir 13:11) and unity (Papir 13:12), together with the associated topics of substance and existence (Papir 13:8), immediate and mediate agency (Papir 13:10) and necessity and freedom (Papir 13:10).20

13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20

Martensen’s recollection is quoted in George Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century: The Paradox and the ‘Point of Contact’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 11. See also Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 30. SKS 27, Papir 13:7, p. 48. See also Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), 194. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 203–6. Ibid., 206–11. Ibid., 211–19. Ibid., 219–28. Ibid., 228–32. SKS 27, Papir 13:8–12, pp. 48–51. See also Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century, 23.

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As for how one is to understand these attributes, Schleiermacher is careful to underscore his view that, despite ostensibly being about God, in fact ‘they are only meant to explain the feeling of absolute dependence’.21 His way of guarding against the temptation to view the attributes as somehow expressive of the nature or being of the Godhead in Godself is to show how the three ways of talking about God – the via eminentiæ, the via negationis and the via causalitatis – serve as mutual correctives. For example, in the case of the first two ways, it is clear that negation by itself is no way to posit any attribute, unless something positive remains behind the negation. In that case the negation will consist simply in the fact that the limits of the positive are denied. But in the same manner the way of the removal of limits is a negation, for something is posited of God, but the limits which elsewhere would be co-posited are not posited of God.22 And as for the third way, ‘in so far as a plurality of attributes is developed out of the idea of the divine causality, this differentiation can correspond to nothing real in God’.23 Kierkegaard does not record Schleiermacher’s discussion of the three ways, but Pattison’s suggestion that Kierkegaard likely would have taken careful note of the mutually corrective nature of this discussion seems right.24 It is even quite possible that Kierkegaard recalled recording Clausen’s discussion of these ways in ‘Notebook 1’ at around the same time, so to copy them down again could have seemed to him redundant. In any case, Kierkegaard clearly registered Schleiermacher’s larger claim about the relationship between our feeling of absolute dependence and the divine causality, since he reproduces the entire heading of §54, under which Schleiermacher addresses divine omnipotence: In the conception of the div[ine] Omnipotence two ideas are contained: [first,] that the entire system of Nature, comprehending all times and spaces, is founded upon the div[ine causality], which as eternal and omnipresent is in contrast to all finite causality; [and second,] that the div[ine] causality, as affirmed in our feeling of absolute dependence, is compl[etely] presented in the totality of finite being, and consequently everything for which there is a causality in God happens and becomes real.25 What follows in the Glaubenslehre is an involved discussion that, if space here permitted, might be profitably compared with an important theme in Kierkegaard’s later thinking, for example, in The Sickness unto Death where we read, ‘God is that all things are possible, or that all things are possible is God.’26 Schleiermacher isolates what he takes to be a set of confusions in the theological tradition that have arisen from distinguishing between, for example, the potential and the actual in God,27 the mediate and immediate exercise of divine omnipotence,28 divine freedom and necessity29 and the active and inactive will of God.30 He maintains,

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 198. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 198. Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century, 23. SKS 27, Papir 13:10, p. 50; Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 211. SUD, 40 (translation altered) / SKS 11, 155. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 214. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 216–17. Ibid., 218.

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the whole idea of the divine omnipotence appears most endangered, when an active and an inactive, and a free and a necessary, divine will are set one over against the other. The necessary will would be related to what God wills in virtue of his essence, the free to that which, so far as His essence is concerned, He could just as well not will.31 For this reason, Schleiermacher concludes, ‘we must therefore think of nothing in God as necessary without at the same time positing it as free, nor as free unless at the same time it is necessary’.32 Said another way, Schleiermacher maintains that in relating our consciousness of absolute dependence back to the idea of divine causality, we arrive at the essential identification of divine freedom as divine necessity, and vice versa. In his note on this paragraph, Kierkegaard schematizes the contrast Schleiermacher resolves thus: Actual – possible. God can cause all that is possible, or all which contains no contradiction in itself: mediate – immed[iate]. | absolute – ordered. absolute div[ine] will – conditioned. – I think someone could show how unreasonable it is to distinguish between an immediate and mediate divine agency in the following way. The concept of mediate agency entails using means; but the object I use as a means must eo ipso be there as something given, which I then exercise some power over, but which at the same time exercises power over me; but such a relationship cannot be considered consistent with the absolute freedom of God. Oct[ober] 1st 1834. necessary [will] – free [will] (what God wills in virtue of his essence.) (what he in virtue of his essence could just as well not will) active – inactive33 Interestingly, the brief thought experiment Kierkegaard interjects in this note (beginning with ‘I think someone’ and ending with the date) seems at first to follow Schleiermacher exactly, but in the end he does not expressly endorse the notion of necessity in God, only God’s ‘absolute freedom’. It may well be the case that this was one of the points on which Martensen remembers Kierkegaard as having been somewhat quarrelsome. Did Kierkegaard actually resist Schleiermacher’s conclusion here? We will never know. But it may have been a point Kierkegaard regarded as speculative transgression on Schleiermacher’s part (even if Schleiermacher did not intend dogmatics to be a speculative endeavour). It is perhaps instructive to look ahead once more to what Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Anti-Climacus writes in The Sickness unto Death. His claim there that ‘God is that all things are possible’ is clearly a variation on the biblical theme that ‘with God all things are possible’ (Mt. 19.26, Mk 10.27; cf. Lk. 1.37). Anti-Climacus does not continue on to posit the speculative antithesis that God is that all things are necessary. Indeed, while for a human being it might be the case that ‘personhood is a synthesis of possibility 31 32 33

Ibid., 216. Ibid., 217. SKS 27, Papir 13:10, pp. 50–1.

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and necessity’, he does not say this of God, for that would be tantamount to determinism or fatalism.34 And of fatalism he writes, ‘The fatalist is in despair, has lost God and thus his self, for he who does not have a God does not have a self, either. But the fatalist has no God, or, what amounts to the same thing, his God is necessity.’35 The comparison of Kierkegaard’s student notes to The Sickness unto Death perhaps risks anachronism, but it does at least show that however he might have viewed Schleiermacher’s treatment of the divine attributes during his student days, he did not fully endorse Schleiermacher’s views in later years. In any case, since it is to Kierkegaard’s own authorship that we need now to turn, we must draw this section of his theological formation to a close. Subsequent to 1834, he would never address the divine attributes as a set topic in Christian dogmatics; in all his writings, published and unpublished, he never reproduced any list or set piece discussion of the divine attributes such as he encountered in Balle, Clausen and Schleiermacher. Yet, all of the divine attributes that appear prominently in the theological tradition feature importantly in Kierkegaard’s thinking as well and, as we shall see, the greatest of these is love. Schleiermacher did not address divine love in his section on the divine attributes, but in §167 of the Glaubenslehre he affirmed that ‘love alone and no other attribute can be equated . . . with God’.36 Balle would have agreed that God is love, of course, but the closest his catechetical list of the divine attributes gets to this affirmation is that ‘God is compassionate’.37 Clausen’s lectures on the attributes, however, observed that God is not only compassionate but is ‘Love’, and here Kierkegaard noted parenthetically, ‘Love is a predicative attribute, it is the expression for personality.’38 Regardless of whether or not he would ever remember Clausen as having prompted this insight, this theme captured Kierkegaard’s imagination. Five years later, as he was writing his dissertation on The Concept of Irony and thus coming to the end of his time in the university, and in fact on the very same day he penned such considerably more famous ‘Kierkegaardian’ lines such as ‘All of existence makes me anxious’ and ‘my grief is my castle’, he wrote the words, It is really remarkable that while all the other attributes ascribed to God are adjectives, ‘Love’ alone is a substantive, and it would scarcely occur to one to make the mistake of saying: [‘]God is lovely.’ Thus language itself has given expression to the substantial element that is found in this attribute. – 12 May 39.–39

II. REVERBERATIONS OF THE CATECHISM IN KIERKEGAARD’S WRITINGS It would be hard to exaggerate the importance the conception that ‘God is Love’ took on for Kierkegaard. In the following section, we shall see that in Kierkegaard’s writings 34 35 36

37 38 39

SUD, 40 / SKS 11, 155. SUD, 40 / SKS 11, 155. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 730. Unfortunately, there is no textual evidence that Kierkegaard ever made it this far in the Glaubenslehre. Balle, Lærebog, 15. KJN 3, p. 74 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:9, p. 78. KJN 2, p. 22 / SKS 18, EE:62, p. 27; one might observe that ‘Spirit’ is also a substantive, but insofar as Kierkegaard will ultimately say that the Spirit of God is Love, we can pass over this without further comment here.

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he ultimately interpreted all of the other divine attributes in terms of divine love. Before making that case, however, let us return to Balle’s list of the divine attributes and use it to take soundings in Kierkegaard’s writings for how and where these attributes appear. What follows is by no means intended as a comprehensive catalogue of instances where Kierkegaard mentions or discusses the divine attributes. The examples that follow are representative, and serve to illustrate the fact that Kierkegaard thinks of God not solely in such philosophical terms as ‘possibility’, ‘the absolute’, ‘paradox’ and so on, but also regularly in traditional doctrinal terms as (following Balle’s list) Spirit, eternal, changeless, omnipotent, omniscient, all-wise, omnipresent, good, compassionate, holy, just, truthful and faithful.

§1. God Is Spirit Kierkegaard’s meditations on the theme of God as Spirit recur throughout his writings, and one of the early instances in which Jn 4.24 and the catechism reverberate most clearly is in an upbuilding discourse from 1843 entitled ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’. The very title announces the topic as one that continuously occupies Kierkegaard – namely, subjectivity or interiority – and the concern of the discourse is to elucidate the fact that although any ‘external witness’ of divine activity in the doings and tumult of the outer world would be a ‘deception’, nevertheless, ‘God does not leave himself without a witness. But God is spirit and therefore can give a witness only in the spirit; it is in the inner being.’40 Readers more familiar with the Concluding Unscientific Postscript than with Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses might hear resonances here with Johannes Climacus’s statement that ‘God is a subject and hence only for subjectivity in inwardness.’41 Rightly so. And those who know Schleiermacher’s Glaubenslehre better than Kierkegaard’s writings will likely recall the striking passage on inwardness there: ‘If . . . time and space everywhere represent externality, and we here always presuppose a something which, by extending itself in time and space, becomes an external object, in the same way the antithesis to time and space may be described as the absolutely inward.’42 To say ‘God is spirit’ is to say God is absolutely inward. Kierkegaard agrees, but when writing in his edifying mode he inflects his language in a more biblically and doctrinally specific fashion. In connection with the theology of creation, for example, Kierkegaard affirms that ‘God created the human being in his image’ not because of any physical form, but because the human spirit is like unto divine spirit.43 And, as he writes in an 1847 discourse entitled ‘How Glorious it is to be a Human Being’ (the second of three discourses on ‘What We Learn from the Lilies in the Field and from the Birds of the Air’), God is spirit, is invisible, and the image of invisibility, of course, is in turn invisibility. Thus the invisible Creator reproduces himself in the invisibility, which is the qualification of spirit, and the image of God is explicitly the invisible glory. If God were visible, well, then no one could resemble him or be his image, because the image of all that is visible does not exist, and in all that is visible there is nothing, not even a leaf, that resembles another or is its image. If that were the case, then the image would be the object itself. But since God is invisible, no one can visibly resemble him.44

40 41 42 43 44

EUD, 88 / SKS 5, 94. CUP, 200 / SKS 7, 183. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 203. UDVS, 192 / SKS 8, 289. UDVS, 192 / SKS 8, 289–90; emphasis in original.

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The lilies of the field in all their visible beauty do not resemble God, but the human spirit can mirror the divine spirit – ‘Must it not be glorious to be clothed in this way!’45

§2. God Is Eternal, Always Changeless Kierkegaard contrasts eternity and the ever-changing temporal scene in some connection or another in virtually all his writings. This dialectical opposition is no doubt cast in highest relief in Philosophical Fragments, where ‘the god-man’ is presented as the paradoxical moment of incarnation in which eternity and temporality intersect absolutely in ‘the fullness of time’.46 But Kierkegaard also regularly speaks simply of the ‘Eternal God’,47 or ‘the Eternal One’,48 or ‘the eternal being’49 or (what comes to the same thing) of ‘God as changeless’.50 That Kierkegaard was especially transfixed by God’s changelessness is evident in his identification of the first chapter of the Epistle of James (which speaks of God in whom ‘there is no variation or shadow due to change’ v.17) as, in his words, ‘my first, my beloved, text’.51 We only note this here, but will return to his discourse on eternal love entitled ‘The Changelessness of God’ in the following section.

§3. God Is Omnipotent Omnipotence, the first of the ‘omni’ attributes in Balle’s list, comes with more philosophical baggage than spirit or eternality, particularly with respect to the problem of evil. As David Hume framed the ‘old questions . . . yet unanswered’ of Epicurus, ‘Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both and willing? whence then is evil?’52 Kierkegaard’s answer is suggestive of the possibility that these old questions conceive divine omnipotence incorrectly in the first place. God is ‘the Omnipotent One, who creates out of nothing’, he says, but is not only that. ‘If God were only the omnipotent One, then there would be no reciprocal relationship, because for the Omnipotent One the creature is nothing. But for love it is something.’53 In his journal, Kierkegaard meditates on the ability of divine omnipotence to create relationships through loving self-restraint this way, The entire question of the relation of God’s omnipotence and God’s goodness to evil can perhaps – instead of making the distinction that God accomplishes the good and merely permits what is evil – be solved quite simply in the following manner. The absolutely greatest thing that can be done for a being, greater than anything one could make it into, is to make it free. It is precisely here that omnipotence is required. This seems odd, as it is precisely omnipotence that has the capacity to make something dependent. But if one reflects on omnipotence, one will indeed see that it must precisely also contain the ability, in an expression of omnipotence, to retreat into itself

45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53

UDVS, 192 / SKS 8, 289. PF, 18 / SKS 4, 226; emphasis in original. See also Gal. 4.4. CD, 211 / SKS 10, 219. CD, 208 / SKS 10, 216. EUD, 166 / SKS 5, 165. See especially, ‘The Changelessness of God’, in TM, 263–81 / SKS 13, 319–39. See also EUD, 32, 34, 121–2, 136, 393, 395 / SKS 5, 42, 43, 126, 138, 375, 377; and CD, 51–2 / SKS 10, 61–2. KJN 8, p. 370 / SKS 24, NB24:74, p. 365. David Hume, Principal Writings on Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 100. CD, 127; see also 81, 168 / SKS 10, 138; see also 89–90, 180.

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again in such a way as to allow that which owes its existence to omnipotence to be independent . . . Only omnipotence can take itself back while it gives away, and this relationship is indeed the independence of the recipient. God’s omnipotence is therefore his goodness.54 Characteristically, Kierkegaard does not formalize his answer to these ‘old questions’, but there is more than enough here to make evident that he thinks on the matter in terms of a free-will defence of divine omnipotence.

§4. God Is Omniscient If ‘creation out of nothing is’, as Kierkegaard maintains, ‘an expression of the capacity of omnipotence to make someone independent’,55 then the moral conscience can be regarded as an expression of the capacity of divine omniscience to awaken us to our responsibilities to God and to our neighbors. He writes poetically of ‘the omniscience of the Knower of Hearts’,56 and affirms that it is ‘only the Omniscient One’ who has ‘knowledge of the human heart’.57 Notwithstanding that God creates everything from nothing and thus knows all that is, for Kierkegaard divine omniscience principally concerns God’s intimate familiarity with the spiritual directionality of each human being. And, as he asks in Works of Love, what is that but conscience? ‘In the conscience it is God who looks at a person; so now in everything the person must look to him.’58 To do otherwise is ‘cowardly’, as he writes elsewhere – it is the cowardice of being ‘too proud to have an almighty God as co-knower’.59 Clearly, then, Kierkegaard envisions God as the one from whom no secrets are hidden.

§5. God Is All-wise Similarly, Kierkegaard envisions God as the ‘eternal wisdom’60 whose intentions are always the best, even if to human eyes providential intentions are ultimately unfathomable. Even the trials of suffering – ‘the thorn in the flesh’, as he echoes St Paul in an 1844 discourse – when taken to God can be ‘forgotten in the understanding with Governance’s inscrutable wisdom, in the blessed instruction of a reconciliation’.61 Kierkegaard puts the matter in very personal terms in an 1852 journal entry concerning what he has learned from his own suffering: Oh, my God, my God: My childhood was unhappy, excruciating; my youth full of torment – I have groaned, sighed, and cried out. Thank you, nonetheless – not you, the all-wise one – no, no, thank you, you infinitely loving one – precisely the infinitely loving one – for having done things this way . . . For every such suffering is suffering in community with you, and every such suffering is an eternal acquisition for eternity.62

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

KJN 4, pp. 56–7 / SKS 20, NB:69, pp. 57–8. KJN 4, p. 57 / SKS 20, NB:69, p. 58. CD, 237 / SKS 10, 244. WA, 87 /SKS 11, 91. See also TM, 177, 277 / SKS 13, 227, 335–6. WL, 377 / SKS 9, 370. EUD, 355 / SKS 5, 342. EUD, 87 / SKS 5, 94. EUD, 338 / SKS 5, 326. KJN 8, p. 489 / SKS 24, NB25:64, p. 481.

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Kierkegaard’s manner of expression here might seem to draw a contrast between God’s wisdom and love, but to read it that way would be a mistake. It is not a denial, but rather an intensification of the personal significance of divine wisdom for him interpreted through divine love. And the fact that God is also the infinitely loving one does not cancel the fact that, as Kierkegaard writes elsewhere, ‘everything God does is sheer grace and wisdom’,63 for ‘God is infinite wisdom’.64

§6. God Is Omnipresent Kierkegaard expressly relates divine omnipotence to the fact that God is spirit and not some particular object for observation. We saw this above in ‘How Glorious it is to be a Human Being’ with his avowal that invisibility is a corollary of spirituality, for otherwise ‘physical presence makes it impossible to be omnipresent’.65 Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus elaborates on this logic in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: [A]n omnipresent being is cognizable precisely by his being invisible, simply and solely by this, because his very visibility would annul his omnipresence. This relation between omnipresence and invisibility is like the relation between mystery and revelation, that the mystery expresses that the revelation is revelation in the stricter sense, that the mystery is the one and only mark by which it can be known.66 Kierkegaard also makes this point rhetorically in the discourse called ‘On the Occasion of a Confession’ asking, ‘Can the Omnipresent One actually have become like a rare natural phenomenon whose existence the scientist demonstrates [?]’67 Here he insists that one rightly relates to God inwardly in wonder and fear, whereas any objective scholarly attempt to demonstrate God’s reality is ‘not dealing with God but is discussing something about God’, and is thus superfluous.

§7. God Is Good Just as divine omnipresence is the corollary of divine spirituality, so too God’s goodness is the corollary of God’s omnipotence. In the earlier section on omnipotence we broke off our quotation from Kierkegaard’s journal with the words, ‘God’s omnipotence is therefore his goodness.’ But the passage continues, For it is goodness to give away entirely, though in such a way that, by omnipotently retreating into oneself, one makes the recipient independent. All finite power creates dependence; only omnipotence can create independence, creating from nothing something that has its being in itself, while omnipotence continually retreats into itself. Omnipotence does not remain embedded in a relation to an other, for there is no other to which it is related – no, it can give without giving up the least bit of its power – that is, it can make someone independent.68

63 64 65 66 67 68

CD, 85 / SKS 10, 93. WA, 11 / SKS 11, 17. UDVS, 192 / SKS 8, 289. CUP, 245 / SKS 7, 223. TDIO, p. 25 / SKS 5, p. 405. KJN 4, p. 57 / SKS 20, NB:69, p. 58.

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God’s goodness manifest as creative omnipotence is thus expressed as the power to create contingently autonomous independent agents. But God’s goodness is also, according to Christian doctrine, revealed as divine compassion for the human agents God actually creates.

§8. God Is Compassionate Kierkegaard casts his thoughts concerning divine compassion Christologically, as one might expect, since God in Christ reveals divine compassion. In Practice in Christianity, his pseudonym Anti-Climacus contrasts human compassion and divine compassion in a striking way. Compassion of the merely human sort tends only to identify with others in a partial or preferential way, he says – ‘everyone wants to cling to his own’: Divine compassion, however, the unlimited recklessness in concerning oneself only with the suffering, not in the least with oneself, and of unconditionally recklessly concerning one self with each sufferer – people can interpret this only as a kind of madness over which we are not sure whether we should laugh or cry . . . To make oneself quite literally one with the most wretched (and this, this alone is divine compassion), this is ‘too much’ for people, something they can shed a few emotional tears over during a quiet Sunday hour and involuntarily burst out laughing over when they see it in actuality.69 Christ is the fellow sufferer, ‘the Holy One’,70 who identifies with the human condition and who does so with a reckless abandon totally uncharacteristic of typical human sympathy.

§9. God Is Holy Balle glosses divine holiness by affirming that God always loves the good and takes the greatest displeasure in what is evil. We have seen that Kierkegaard recapitulates these affirmations in what he says about God’s goodness and omnipotence, respectively. But he also speaks of (and addresses) God as the ‘Holy One’71 and, indeed, as the ‘Holy Spirit’,72 and in this connection underscores the importance of the renunciation of evil for the sake of that which is holy. With a gesture to modern incredulity concerning dogmatic matters (and no doubt with a view towards the intellectual prestige of speculative philosophy), he writes in his Pentecost discourse on Acts 2.1-12: You will find hardly anyone who does not believe in, for example, ‘the spirit of the age’. . . Or he believes in the ‘spirit of the world’. . . Or he believes in 'the human spirit,’ not the spirit in the single individual but the spirit of the race . . . On the other hand, as soon as the discourse is about a holy spirit, about believing in a holy spirit, how many do you think believe that? Or when the discourse is about an evil spirit that should be renounced: how many do you think believe in such a thing?

69 70 71 72

PC, 58–9 / SKS 12, 70–1; emphases in original. PC, 178, 256 / SKS 12, 179, 247. See, for example, TDIO, 27–31 / SKS 5, 407–10; CD, p. 212 / SKS 10, 220. See, for example, EUD, 139, 278 / SKS 5, 142, 271; CD, 107, 137 / SKS 10, 118, 147; WA, 127 / SKS 11, 263; SUD, 125 / SKS 11, 236; TM, 317 / SKS 13, 379.

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How can this be? Is it perhaps because the subject becomes too earnest when it is a holy spirit? For I can talk about, believe in, the spirit of the age, the spirit of the world, and the like and do not thereby need to think of anything specific. It is a kind of spirit, but I am not absolutely bound by what I say . . . But one cannot speak about there being a holy spirit and about believing in a holy spirit without binding oneself by one’s words, and furthermore, not without binding oneself to the holy spirit in renunciation of the evil spirit. But Christianity, which requires the renunciation of an evil spirit, teaches that there is a holy spirit.73 Kierkegaard does not here put God’s ‘holiness’ in express connection with the experience of ‘awefulness’, ‘overpoweringness’, or ‘energy’ as it appears, say, in Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy).74 But of course Kierkegaard famously speaks elsewhere of the appropriateness of approaching the God who is holy with anxiety, in fear and trembling, and even exclaims in one of his last published pieces, ‘how frightful you are, you Divine Justice!’75

§10. God Is Just Kierkegaard seems to expect his readers to find the very idea of God’s righteousness problematic or at the very least puzzling. In a short piece from the eighth issue of The Moment entitled ‘Divine Justice’ he observes that ‘in this world’ it often appears that the most dreadful of crimes can go unpunished, and that things sometimes go so well for the ‘genuinely capital criminal’ that it almost seems either that divine justice is ‘very lenient or nonexistent’.76 Consistent with the free will defence of divine omnipotence that we saw above, however, Kierkegaard here defends the fact that wickedness oftentimes goes unpunished in this world by articulating a fuller understanding of God’s ‘severity’ than is envisioned by those who object that divine justice is either overly lax or simply does not exist: Precisely in order to be justice, it must first allow the crime to come into existence in its full guilt; but the genuine capital crime needs – note this well! – a whole lifetime in order to come into existence, is specifically the genuine capital crime by being continued a whole lifetime. But of course no crime can be punished before it comes into existence. Therefore this objection collapses. The objection actually ends up saying that God should punish so quickly that he (it amounts to the same thing) should punish the thief before he steals. But if the crime must have come into existence before it is punished, and if the capital crime (the very one that upsets you) needs a whole lifetime to come into existence, then it cannot be punished in this life; to punish it in this life would not be to punish it but to prevent it, just as it would not be a punishing of the theft if one punished the thief before he stole but would be a preventing of the theft and of his becoming a thief.77

73 74 75 76 77

FSE, 74–5 / SKS 13, 96–7. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), 12–24. TM, 305 / SKS 13, 364. TM, 304 / SKS 13, 364. TM, 305 / SKS 13, 364.

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On this understanding, human beings must be genuinely free to sin in order for divine righteousness to be genuinely just. Yet, people are also called to repentance, and in repentance to discover that God is not only just but is also truthful and faithful. For just as we saw above in connection with omnipotence (i.e. that ‘if God were only the omnipotent One, then there would be no reciprocal relationship’), so too with divine justice – namely, that if God were only the ‘just’ one, then there would be no reciprocal relationship, but ‘if we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness’ (1 Jn 1.9). Or, as Kierkegaard puts it, God ‘is truthful and keeps his promises’.78

§11. God Is Truthful and Faithful It is perhaps enough at the end of this protracted series of soundings to quote just one more passage evidencing how fully Kierkegaard had taken the catechism to heart, and how fully its teachings on the divine attributes reverberate through his subsequent writings. Balle’s last paragraph on the divine attributes contains two related properties – truthfulness and faithfulness – and in Kierkegaard’s 1843 discourse entitled ‘The Expectancy of Faith’ he couples these attributes in like fashion. The context is one in which Kierkegaard is exploring putting someone’s faith in others who then disappoint one’s expectations. If one then continued in faith despite the disappointment, it might well have been simply a beautiful fantasy that you ought to have given up. We do not know. But this we do know that if in this faith you forgot that there is a higher faith, then, despite its beauty, this faith would only be to your ruination. But if you had faith in God, how then would your faith ever be changed into a beautiful fantasy you had better give up? Would he then be able to be changed, he in whom there is no change or shadow of variation? Would he not be faithful, he through whom every human being who is faithful is faithful; would he not be without guile, he through whom you yourself had faith? Would there ever be an explanation that could explain otherwise than that he is truthful and keeps his promises?79 Kierkegaard invites his reader to reflect on these questions. No doubt he trusts ‘that single individual’ whom he calls ‘my reader’ to be familiar with Num. 23.19 and Ps. 33.4, which Balle cites as the biblical warrants for affirming God’s truthfulness and faithfulness.80 And in the expectancy of faith he prays his reader will see that true human faithfulness, genuine fidelity to the truth, ultimately rests in the unchanging faithfulness and truthfulness of God’s love – ‘the same God who, after having led us by his hand through the world, draws back his hand and opens his arms to receive in them the yearning soul. Amen!’81

78 79 80

81

EUD, 25 / SKS 5, 33. EUD, 25 / SKS 5, 33. EUD, 5 / SUD 5, 13; Balle, Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, 16; ‘God is not a human being, that he should lie, or a mortal, that he should change his mind. Has he promised, and will he not do it? Has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?’ (Num. 23.19); ‘For the word of the Lord is upright [or, ‘right and true’], and all his work is done in faithfulness’ (Ps. 33.4). EUD, 29 / SKS 5, 37.

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III. GOD IS LOVE As I noted above, neither Balle nor Schleiermacher included love in their respective sections dealing with the divine attributes. Schleiermacher included an ‘appendix’ to the second section of the Glaubenslehre addressing ‘some other divine attributes’, but even there he did not address divine love.82 But no consideration of the divine attributes in Kierkegaard’s writings could be complete without addressing divine love, for Kierkegaard considers love the divine attribute par excellence – the attribute instar omnium most fully expressing the nature of God. ‘It is really remarkable’, we saw him observe just as he was concluding his university years, ‘that while all the other attributes ascribed to God are adjectives, “Love” alone is a substantive, and it would scarcely occur to one to make the mistake of saying: [“]God is lovely.” Thus language itself has given expression to the substantial element that is found in this attribute.’83 Love is the substance of the divine nature. Across his entire authorship, in pseudonymous works, in writings published under his own name, and his journals and notebooks, he regularly turns and returns to the biblical affirmation that God is love (1 Jn 4.8, 16). His pseudonym Johannes de Silentio writes, ‘I am convinced that God is love’;84 Johannes Climacus speaks of God’s ‘nature, which is love’;85 and Anti-Climacus echoes this commitment only somewhat differently with the words, ‘Governance is love.’86 Under his own name, he opens Works of Love with a prayer to ‘Eternal Love’: ‘How could one speak properly about love if you were forgotten, you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth; you who spared nothing but in love gave everything; you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you!’87 Read in the light of this prayer, it is possible to see that the ‘God is love’ motif is omnipresent in Kierkegaard’s theological writings.88 But we can only recognize this fact when ‘love’ is interpreted properly. To say God is love is not to say that God loves as a loving human being loves ‘plus a little bit more’.89 Rather, divine love manifests inversely to our ‘natural’ expectations, and corresponds to a human being learning to ‘die away’ from the world. As he writes in his journal, ‘God is love. The bird on the branch, the lily in the field, the deer in the wood, the fish in the sea, numberless hosts of happy people rejoice: God is love. But beneath, as though bearing all these sopranos as the bass part does, there sounds de profundis from those sacrificed: God is love.’90 And again,

82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90

Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 228–32. KJN 2, p. 22 / SKS 18, EE:62, p. 27. FT, 34 / SKS 4, 129. CUP, 137 / SKS 7, 128. PC, 190–1 / SKS 12, 190. WL, 3–4 / SKS 9, 12. For the phrase ‘God is love’ (not to mention the various permutations in which this idea appears) see, for example, EUD, 325, 393, 397 / SKS 5, 315, 374, 378; UDVS, 101, 267–9, 273–4, 279–80, 282–3 / SKS 8, 205, 365–7, 369–71, 375–6, 378; WL, 190, 281, 364, 365, 376 / SKS 9, 190, 279, 358, 359, 376; CD, 130, 191, 193–4, 197–9 / SKS 10, 140, 201, 203–4, 207–8; WA, 11 / SKS 11, 17; TM, 178, 294 / SKS 13, 228, 352; KJN 2, p. 163 / SKS 18, JJ:112, p. 66; KJN 4, pp. 362–4 / SKS 20, NB4:159, pp. 362–5; KJN 5, p. 110 / SKS 21, NB7:59, p. 105; KJN 6, p. 235 / SKS 22, NB12:143, p. 233; KJN 7, p. 291 / SKS 23, NB18:51, p. 286; KJN 8, p. 330 / SKS 24, NB24:14, p. 327; KJN 9, pp. 193–4 / SKS 25, NB27:78, p. 192. KJN 5, p. 110 / SKS 21, NB7:59, p. 105. KJN 9, p. 49 / SKS 25, NB26:47, p. 52.

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In hum[an] innocence, a hum[an] being – that is, the natural hum. being – wishes and desires to take delight in this life, to enjoy its goods, earthly goods – ah, and God is love, infinite love, and he has every good gift in his hand. And the giver of these good gifts is so close to a hum. being – ah, blessedly, so infinitely close: in him we live and move and have our being, and he is the Almighty, who at every instant has millions of possibilities – and the hum. being has an understanding with this God, that he has nothing against rejoicing in this life and enjoying its goods. Then comes Xnty. All at once it says: No, stop. To be sure, God is love – but he is spirit; he has an entirely different concept of good gifts than you do. What he requires, if you want to be in agreement with him and thus to be able to pray to him, is that you find it more blessed to do without than to get, more blessed to suffer than to enjoy.91 On this view, then – which Kierkegaard models on the imitation of Christ – one suffers more profoundly the more conscientiously she or he turns to God. ‘And how paradoxical’, he says, ‘that it is precisely the religion that solely and from the beginning has taught that God is love – that it then teaches, or shows through examples, that to relate oneself to this loving God is to come to suffer.’92 Nevertheless, there is still ‘joy and gladness’93 to be found in relating oneself to God, Kierkegaard says, and he can speak ‘both in terror and for reassurance’94 about a living faith in the God who is ‘love itself ’.95 He does so nowhere more powerfully than in his discourse entitled ‘The Changelessness of God’, which he first delivered in the Citadel Church in Copenhagen in 1851, and which he subsequently published in 1855, the year of his death. The Scripture reading is Jas 1.17-21, Kierkegaard’s ‘beloved’ text, in which the first sentence reads, ‘Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change or shadow of variation.’ Kierkegaard takes his cue from here. God is indeed the ‘eternally Changeless One’.96 But unlike the unmoved mover of Aristotelian metaphysics, the God to whom Kierkegaard prays is also ‘Infinite Love’ and is for this reason a mover willing to be moved.97 As Kierkegaard addresses God in his opening prayer, ‘O you who in infinite love let yourself be moved, may this our prayer also move you to bless it so that the prayer may change the one who is praying into conformity with your changeless will, you Changeless One!’98 The key to understanding what the divine attributes of eternity and changelessness mean for Kierkegaard, then, is to think not simply in terms of classical ontology but rather to envision God as unwavering love itself who in eternal constancy alters not when it alteration finds. Likewise, the attributes of divine omnipotence and omnipresence are best and most fully understood not solely in terms of metaphysical power over the physical space-time continuum, but (as we saw above) in establishing a loving relationship with God’s creatures. ‘Omnipotent, he created this visible world – and made himself invisible’ so that (unlike any visible creature located in time and space)

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

KJN 9, pp. 193–4 / SKS 25, NB27:78, p. 192. KJN 8, p. 498 / SKS 24, NB25:71, p. 490. TM, 269 / SKS 13, 328. TM, 271 / SKS 13, 330. TM, 270 / SKS 13, 329. TM, 270 / SKS 13, 329. TM, 268 / SKS 13, 327. TM, 268 / SKS 13, 327.

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God can be ‘omnipresent . . . at the least and at the greatest . . . when a sparrow dies and when the Savior of the human race is born.’99 And because God is also the ‘Omniscient One’, Kierkegaard affirms that, truly, ‘God knows what’ – not only the infinite events of cosmic time and of all human history, but ‘knows down to the least detail what you have forgotten’.100 So God’s loving omnibenevolence is not indulgent permissiveness, but rather possesses the attribute of justice, for God ‘does not only hold an accounting, he is the accounting’.101 But God is the accounting precisely so that we too will learn to take account of our own wayward lives, then in taking account learn to will ‘as he wills’, to relinquish ‘self-will’ and ultimately to ‘rest ever more blessedly’ in the creative love of God.102 It is all ‘just for our own good’ that God is ‘changeless in love’.103 More than anywhere else in his authorship this final discourse makes clear how Kierkegaard uses the divine attribute of love to interpret and elucidate the lived religious significance (i.e. for us human beings) of the divine attributes.

CONCLUSION It has tempted some to read Kierkegaard and conclude that his entire authorship concerns only the human side of what goes by the name ‘theological anthropology’.104 It is true that he oftentimes seems preoccupied with the psalmist’s question, ‘what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?’ (Ps. 8.4). And, of course, in Kierkegaard’s religious writings Jesus’s question, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ often becomes the implicit focus as well (Mt. 16.15, Mk 8.29, Lk. 9.20). Yet, questions about the nature of God, by contrast, might seem only rarely to be Kierkegaard’s express focus. If this chapter has made clear that Kierkegaard took Christian doctrine concerning the divine attributes every bit as seriously as, say, theologians such as Balle, or Clausen, or Schleiermacher, then it will have accomplished its ambition. Obviously, Kierkegaard’s manner of treating the divine attributes was very different from a catechism, or from lectures or a treatise in dogmatics. Writers of catechisms traditionally present the church’s teaching as paragraphs for memorization, and professors of dogmatics often present doctrine and theologoumena in scientific detachment and for scholarly examination. For his part, Kierkegaard maintained that doctrine itself is ‘very good’, but that conventionally and habitually ‘the doctrine is kept at too great a distance’ and so ‘our lives are only slightly touched by the doctrine’.105 The mood of self-involvement we encounter in the devotional and brooding writings of Kierkegaard thus offer an alternative in which as readers we might actually be touched by the teaching and moved beyond rote memorization and learned disquisition – moved (as we read in the prayer to ‘The Changelessness of God’) into conformity with God’s will, and thus also moved to greater constancy in love.

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TM, 271 / SKS 13, 330; cf. ‘God, who creates from nothing, omnipotently takes from nothing and says, “Become”; he lovingly adds, “Become something even in relation to me.” What wonderful love; even his omnipotence is the power of love.’ CD, 127 / SKS 10, 138. TM, 277 / SKS 13, 335. TM, 278 / SKS 13, 337. TM, 278 / SKS 13, 337. TM, 268 / SKS 13, 327. See, for example, Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (London: SCM Press, 1980), 9, 71. KJN 8, p. 291 / SKS 24, NB23:33, p. 221.

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FURTHER READING Gunton, Colin E. Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. Martensen, Hans Lassen. Christian Dogmatics: A Compendium of the Doctrines of Christianity, translated by William Urwick. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1898 [1849]. See, especially, §50–§56 of the second chapter, headed ‘The Attributes of God’ (pp. 91–101). Pattison, George. Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century: The Paradox and the ‘Point of Contact’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Rae, Murray. Kierkegaard and Theology. London: T&T Clark International, 2010. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. The Christian Faith, translated and edited by H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989 [1830–1]. See, especially, §50–§56 of the second section, headed ‘The Divine Attributes which are related to the Religious Self-consciousness so far as it expresses the General Relationship between God and the World’ (pp. 194–232).

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Providence: Right in Front of Our Noses? NATHAN PAYLOR

INTRODUCTION There is a moment in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth when the main character, Axel Lidenbrock, becomes lost in a subterranean labyrinth, separated from his fellow travellers without food or water. In despair he contemplates ‘the help of heaven’ and offers a final, desperate prayer. ‘This return to providence’, says Axel, ‘made me a little calmer and I was able to concentrate all the forces of my mind on the situation.’1 Like Axel, we often find Kierkegaard relating to providence in a crucible of circumstance and despair. What is more, Kierkegaard seems to have received from this not just comfort but the means by which he made sense of his situation, his tribulations, as well as the purpose of his existence – including his career and even the span of his life. He would write at a late point in his life that ‘to be a Christian means to believe in a special providence’.2 Yet, despite the obvious significance of the doctrine of providence to Kierkegaard, turning to him for a fully orbed ‘doctrine’ of providence is more likely to result in disappointment than victory. Of course, this need not apply only to the subject of providence; we are (after all) speaking about a man notorious for escaping tidy theological classification. Others have described his stubborn refusal to occupy ‘commodious categories’,3 as well as what appears at first glance to be the ‘element of self-contradiction and confusion’ intrinsic to ‘Kierkegaard’s relation to church doctrine and faith’.4 With his account of the doctrine of providence, however, we find ourselves in a particularly strange situation. Two Danish nouns feature in Kierkegaard’s handling of what we would term providence.5 First, Styrelsen (translated as ‘Governance’) is comparable to stiura in Old High German and steor in Old English, from which we derive the word ‘steer’. As this might imply, Styrelsen implies a dynamic semantic range. We find connotations of ‘steering’ the rudder of a ship, controlling its direction, such that the vessel is bound to obey its helm. Styrelsen can also denote power, dominion, mastery and authority. The second Danish

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Jules Verne, Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 126. JP 2:2083, p. 447 / SKS 26, NB36:20, p. 421. Paul L. Holmer, ‘Kierkegaard and Theology ’, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 12 (1957): 23–31. David J. Gouwens, ‘Kierkegaard’s Understanding of Doctrine’, Modern Theology 5, no. 1 (1988): 13–22. Jack Mulder, Jr, ‘Governance / Providence’, in Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Tome III: Envy to Incognito, ed. Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15: tome III (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2014), 113–14.

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noun employed by Kierkegaard is Forsyn (translated as ‘providence’) – influenced by the Latin providentia. This term is freely employed in the dogmatic materials of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries to describe providence directly,6 although it also carries connotations of guardianship, care and provision. Despite Forsyn being the more technical term used to describe the doctrine of God’s providence, Kierkegaard often opted for Styrelsen – or ‘Governance’. Although we will see that this did not stop him from describing providence in ways that comport with Lutheran orthodoxy, we should observe from the outset that he was less interested in systematic classification. His emphasis on Styrelsen – even just linguistically – is no accident. Providence is no mere doctrinal locus for Kierkegaard; it became for him a lived-out experience of the steering hand of God upon the rudder of his life, a cause to rejoice as well as tremble. So how might one approach a study of providence in Kierkegaard given this peculiar, perhaps even informal, hue? Recent scholarly appraisals are various in their treatment of this question and rather limited in number. Near the turn of the millennium Heiko Schulz remarked how it ‘may seem a little odd . . . to turn one’s attention to such an apparently marginal part of his thought at all’, concluding that one might search the relevant literature ‘in vain’ for a study of Kierkegaard and providence.7 The situation has improved a little in recent years.8 Markus Kleinert’s comparison of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche focuses explicitly on the doctrine of providence, highlighting how both men used ‘the idea of providence as a way of reflecting on the problematic place of religion in modernity’.9 Meanwhile, Jack Mulder’s discussion of the subject underlines the ‘messiness’ of Kierkegaard’s accounting for providence (and its related themes), concluding that his ‘full position on the doctrine of providence may be as difficult to discern as the doctrine itself ’.10 Any attempt to approach Kierkegaard on the doctrine of providence will prove complicated; that much is obvious. There is, however, a vibrant personality about Kierkegaard’s handling of this subject, one that is difficult to find in most other dogmatic treatments. True, it is difficult to find a doctrine of providence here, properly speaking. One would certainly struggle to find a systematic appraisal as one might in the works of his contemporaries, N. F. S. Grundtvig or H. N. Clausen. This does not mean, however, that Kierkegaard did not possess a theology of providence – or perhaps that he did not think theologically about the subject. He most certainly did. Indeed, we shall suggest here that his theological approximation of providence is: 1. Described Incidentally – by employing robust and meticulous ways of speaking about God’s governance, we discover more about Kierkegaard’s view of providence;

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E.g. Henrik Nikolai Clausen, Christelig Troeslære (‘Christian dogmatics’) (Kjöbenhavn: C.A. Reitzels Bo og Arvinger, 1853). In particular, §55 Det Guddommelige Forsyn (‘The providence of God’). Heiko Schulz, ‘Kierkegaard on Providence and Foreknowledge: A Critical Account’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematicsche Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 41, no. 2 (1999): 115–31. Schulz does, however, note a few exceptions – e.g. Emanuel Hirsch, Die Umbildung des überlieferten Vorsehungsglaubens durch Søren Kierkegaard (Berlin: Dorbandt, 1968). One might also include Daniel F. Haynes, ‘Kierkegaard and Providence’ (MA diss., George Washington Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University, 2004) as yet unpublished. Haynes discusses the nature of doctrine and dogma as it pertains to Kierkegaard on providence, as well as the influence of Augustinianism. Markus Kleinert, ‘Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’, in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 402–20 [416]. Mulder, ‘Governance / Providence’, 115–16.

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2. Known Experientially – in his many autobiographical excurses, Kierkegaard presents to us a model of providence with a distinct experiential camber; 3. Refracted Christologically – in Kierkegaard’s account of the historical Christ event, we are provided with a framework for understanding the believer’s temporal relationship with God’s sovereignty. We will address each of these features of Kierkegaard’s understanding of providence in the third section.

I. KIERKEGAARD ON SCRIPTURE AND PROVIDENCE: A FEW SHORT SKETCHES In preparation for our examination of Kierkegaard on providence, let us briefly consider how Kierkegaard engaged with those biblical texts he received as descriptive of it. Some examples appear as spontaneous references or allusions; others manifest within fully fledged expositions. It must suffice here to provide a few brief examples. First, commenting on the death of Bathsheba’s husband in 2 Samuel 11–12, ‘When you read God’s Word’, advises Kierkegaard, ‘in everything you read, continually to say to yourself: It is I to whom it is speaking, it is I about whom it is speaking’.11 He says this as a preface to his discussion of the David and Bathsheba story in For Self-Examination, counselling his readers on what is required in order to see one’s own life reflected in the biblical texts. With this aim he cites 2 Samuel 11–12 to underline the power contained not in an ‘impersonal’ or ‘objective’ and ‘scholarly’ reading of the narrative, but in a reading that allows the text to point a finger and declare to the reader, like the Prophet Nathan, ‘Thou art the man.’12 As he recalls the story of David and Bathsheba, however, Kierkegaard arrives at the point at which David sends Uriah to the frontlines to die. Indeed, he is in fact eventually killed in battle. ‘It is not known for sure how it happened’, says Kierkegaard, but one thing is apparently certain: ‘There must be a Governance.’13 Second, Kierkegaard refers to ‘Governance’ in his comment on the plight of Job, specifically the resolution of Job’s sufferings in chapter 42. Kierkegaard (via the pseudonym Constantine Constantius) has the character of Job declare about his restitution: ‘Is there not, then, a repetition? Did I not get everything double? Did I not get myself again and precisely in such a way that I might have a double sense of its meaning?’14 Here, too, Kierkegaard attributes Job’s rescue to the workings of governance. In particular, he paints such providential workings as kind and merciful, saying that with ‘the help of Governance’ Job was ‘freed from the entanglement’ of his unhappiness.15 Third, on Jesus’s illustration of the birds of the air (Mt. 6.25–34), Kierkegaard reflects in two discourses (‘The Care of Poverty’ and ‘The Care of Abundance’) on the following pericope from Matthew’s Gospel: ‘Therefore do not be anxious, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things’ (Mt. 6.31-32). In the wider passage in Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples to examine the birds of the air, all of which are fed by their Father in heaven. About this text Kierkegaard

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FSE, 36. FSE, 39. FSE, 37. R, 294–5. R, 295.

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makes three observations in these two discourses: one, the birds enjoy a ‘definite portion’ according to God’s providence each and every day;16 two, the birds are therefore carefree and content;17 and three, in like manner, the Christian should exult in the abundance of God’s providence, even if by worldly standards they do not boast a fortune.18 There are several other instances worth noting, including Kierkegaard’s observation that ‘it was Governance . . . who ordained fulfilment of the ancient prophets’ predictions’,19 his three discourses on Jas 1.17 (‘Every Good and Perfect Gift Is From Above’)20 and his discourse on Job 1.21 (‘The Lord Gave, and the Lord Took Away: Blessed Be the Name of the Lord’).21 Again it must suffice here to sketch these few examples. What is clear is that Kierkegaard reads these texts as prima facie descriptions of a God who is intimately involved not just in the ebbs and flows of sacred history but in the everyday events of creation.

II. CLASSES, CONCEPTS AND CATEGORIES: KIERKEGAARD’S INHERITANCE Earlier we suggested that although it might be improper to speak of Kierkegaard possessing a formal doctrine of providence, it is nevertheless helpful to speak of him approximating a theology of providence. We have even noted a handful of exegetical movements in that direction. In truth, although Kierkegaard avoided formal dogmatic reflection on the subject, it is also the case that he inherited major doctrinal categories as well as a theological tradition that at the very least contributed to his outlook on providence, even if negatively. Kleinert nods towards this inheritance: [Kierkegaard’s] ‘The Part played by Governance in my Work as an Author’ uses provocatively insouciant wording to bring the work into relation to this theme of providence, or, more precisely, an aspect of the doctrine of providence that is comprised in Protestant dogmatics under the doctrinal headings of: the divine conservation of the world (conservatio); divine co-operation with nature (concursus); and divine governance of human beings (gubernatio).22 Concerning providence specifically, we might wish to consider some of Kierkegaard’s more concrete influences, specifically the thoughts of his contemporaries – either by looking directly at those who were interested in the task of dogmatics, or, more generally, at the theological assumptions prevalent among Danish Christians in the nineteenth century. As an example of the latter one might consider the influence of Hans Adolph Brorson, a Danish hymn writer who passed away fifty years prior to Kierkegaard’s birth.23 In one of his best-known hymns – ‘Arise All Things That God Hath Made’ – Brorson

16 17 18 19 20

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CD, 23. CD, 22. CD., 24–5. TA, 106. Cf. EUD, 31–48 and 125–58. In the first of these discourses, Kierkegaard states that when God opens his ‘gentle hand’, he blesses ‘everything that lives’. EUD, 31. Cf. EUD, 109–24. Kleinert, ‘Kierkegaard and Nietzsche’, 408, citing PV, 71–90. Brorson was born on 20 June 1694 in Schleswig, the border province between Denmark and Germany, and died on 3 June 1764. Cf. Jens Christian Aaberg, Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark (Des Moines, IA: Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 1945).

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celebrates God’s manifold gifts of providence. In the second, third and fourth stanzas, Brorson even makes several allusions to the same pericope in Matthew’s Gospel (Mt. 6.26-34) about which Kierkegaard wrote two separate discourses.24 One might also consider the influences of Kierkegaard’s former instructors. Consider, for example, the theology of Henrik Nikolai Clausen (1793–1877). Kierkegaard encountered Clausen as a student in the early 1830s, when Clausen was both Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Copenhagen as well as an influential statesman.25 In his commentary on the Augsburg Confession, Clausen describes a trust in God’s providence (with specific regard to one’s lot in life) as obedience to God’s law, at least in part.26 In his Christian Dogmatics Clausen also speaks at length about the unfathomable mystery innate to the machinations of God’s governance (Forsyn-Styrelsen).27 It must be for others to determine how much Kierkegaard was influenced by his tradition and indeed by the theological toil of his contemporaries, especially as it pertains to his treatment of providence in particular.28 For our purposes, however, it is abundantly clear that he inherited major theological modes of description (related to issues of God’s sovereignty, human agency, etc.). More than this, said modes of description must also shape our understanding of Kierkegaard’s theology of providence even if they do not address it directly. How does the deity relate to his creation? What is the extent of his influence over it? Do human beings interact with him synergistically or monergistically? Such queries must necessarily impact upon a consideration of the government and governance of God.

The Divine Nature Kierkegaard was not merely interested in providence as the ‘something’ of God. He does not describe it as one doctrinal locus among many, an itemized entry in the list of God’s attributes. It is instead striking how he presents ‘Governance’ to us as constituent of the divine nature, so much so that he regularly employs the term as a synonym for God himself: ‘Governance kindly sees to it that if there is a more than ordinarily honest person who wants to deny himself, his self-denial can then become true self-denial’;29 ‘The person

24

Brorson writes, Would all the kings of earth display, their utmost pomp and power; They could not make a leaflet stay and grow upon a flower / How could the wisdom I compass to show the grace and wonder; Of but the smallest blade of grass on which the mind would ponder / What shall I say when I admire the verdant meadows blooming; And listen to the joyful choir of birds above them zooming. Aaberg, Hymns and Hymnwriters, 76–7.

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According to Aaberg, Brorson ‘wrote a number of excellent hymns on the work and providence of God’ including ‘Arise All Things’, ‘which is said to have so pleased the king that he chose its author to become bishop’. Aaberg, Hymns and Hymnwriters, 76. Hugh S. Pyper, ‘Henrik Nicolai Clausen: The Voice of Urbane Rationalism’, in Kierkegaard and His Danish Contemporaries: Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 7: tome II (London: Ashgate, 2009), 41–8. Henrik Nicolai Clausen, Den Augsburgske Confession – oversat og belyst ved historisk-dogmatisk Udvikling (Kjöbenhavn: C.A. Reitzels Bo og Arvinger, 1851), 113. Clausen, Christelig Troeslære, 330. One might also consider Clausen’s Christian Dogmatics, §55 Det Guddommelige Forsyn (‘The providence of God’). As for Kierkegaard’s relationship with the theological landscape of his time, consider Pyper’s essay on Kierkegaard and Clausen. For reference one might also consult Robert Preus, ‘The Doctrine of Election as Taught by the Seventeenth Century Lutheran Dogmaticians’, Quartalschrift: Theological Quarterly 55 (1958): 229–61. JFY, 206.

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who has been outside himself returns to himself . . . forgotten in the understanding with Governance’s inscrutable wisdom.’30 This should illustrate the importance with which Kierkegaard described the matter of divine providence, that for him it might characterize not just a part of God’s economy but even God himself. Kierkegaard adds to this a more conventional affirmation of the divine attributes, affirming both God’s omniscience and omnipotence. ‘You do not see God’s omnipotence’, he writes, ‘and yet it is just as fully certain that he, too, is working, that one single moment without him and then the world is nothing.’31 He later says of preaching even to an empty church that he would have ‘one listener more than can be seen, an invisible listener’ – who sees all and hears all, ‘whether I am aware of it or not’.32 This is why it is said of God that ‘in his providence’ all of existence is governed ‘with a wise and omnipresent purpose’.33

The Foreknowledge of God Kierkegaard had a complex relationship with God’s foreknowledge. On the one hand he writes of our being tested on this earth that ‘in foreknowledge Governance certainly’ knew it would happen, rejecting the possibility that ‘Governance in fact did not see far enough ahead’.34 Yet with the same breath he is fast to affirm how ‘human beings are still responsible for it happening’ – elsewhere famously agreeing with Boethius that ‘foreknowledge of the future does not confer necessity upon it’.35 This complex relationship with foreknowledge has often been dissected in the scholarly literature. Heiko Schulz has written of the ‘theoretical problems’ which he believes are implied by the Christian conceptualization of God, problems that ‘Kierkegaard himself was fully aware of ’ and even frequently examined in his journals,36 many directly pertaining to the subject of God’s foreknowledge. Schulz is not necessarily convinced by Kierkegaard’s attempts to separate divine foreknowledge from necessity, speculating that Kierkegaard possibly just chalked the matter up as the essential Christian paradox, something a believer must simply subscribe to.37 Joseph Chapa teases out of Climacus’s Philosophical Fragments something like a similar conclusion. Although the paradox might prove ‘unsolvable’, Chapa suggests ‘Kierkegaard’s response to the soteriological claims of Scripture’ was to ‘wrestle with the mysteries presented there, but then to close the books and revel in the mysteries of God; and to do Christianity’.38 This emphasis on the practice of Christianity as lived and experienced certainly chimes with Kierkegaard’s approximation of a theology of providence. We are confronted by the desire to hold an inherited theological tension – at once affirming the perfection of divine foreknowledge while avoiding the perceived deterministic excesses of previous centuries.

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EUD, 338. PC, 155. PC, 234. TDIO, 93. PC, 155. PF, 80, 334n7. Schulz, ‘Kierkegaard on Providence and Foreknowledge’, 115–31. Ibid., 130. Joseph O. Chapa, ‘Reformed Soteriology in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments’, Journal of Reformed Theology 10 (2016): 129–47 [144–7] – emphasis original.

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Human Agency Timothy P. Jackson writes that ‘Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms offer a consistent, and consistently Arminian, account of grace and freedom’.39 One can understand and perhaps might even agree with this sort of assessment. Kierkegaard often seems to prefer to speak in terms of governance ‘encouraging’ him as opposed to something approaching abject compulsion.40 Add to this the following kind of statement: When the devoted teacher looks affectionately at the child and says: Come, now, make a big jump, my little friend, but if you are afraid, if you do not feel like it, well, then, don’t do it – what a shame if the child could sadden the teacher by not doing it. So also in a person’s relationship to God; he compels no one, he tells one of the dangers in advance, he frightens one through scary imaginings – and then looks at one and says: Just go ahead confidently, my child, but if you are afraid, I will not force you.41 Jackson grounds his assessment on passages like this one. Kierkegaard apparently offers a ‘consistently Arminian’ account of human agency on the basis of a commitment to ‘universal access’ to spiritual things, to ‘equal responsibility’ (as opposed to some form of high sacerdotalism) as well as to ‘human freedom’.42 The problem we face as readers of Kierkegaard is that such depictions of Kierkegaard’s account of human agency can sometimes feel less robust than they might appear at first glance. For example, he might write about how you are ‘not . . . compelled against your will’ – followed by, ‘but blessed are you if your will compels you in such a way that you might say: I cannot do otherwise’.43 We might discover Kierkegaard insisting that God ‘draws all to himself ’ (over and above some kind of limited model) – only to see him then affirm how, despite this, ‘it does not follow that many are chosen; on the contrary, it says that only few are chosen’.44 Governance is said to plant and arrange an ‘inner striving’ within an individual so as to direct one down a certain path;45 about his own choices it is said that governance’s part ‘is so infinite’,46 and he even chastises those who would (in their ‘arrogance’) seek to deny God’s sovereignty.47 At one point in the Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard employs a manner of speaking that is strikingly reminiscent of orthodox, magisterial Protestantism: Behold, every morning the sun rises over the earth at day’s dawning. Its rays penetrate everywhere at every point; there is no place so remote that the sun’s rays do not illuminatingly penetrate there. But it makes no distinction in its acquaintance with earth; it shines equally everywhere and knows every place. But he, humankind’s eternal sun – his acquaintance with humankind also penetrates to everyone everywhere like rays of light, but he makes a distinction. There are also those he does not know, those to

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Timothy P. Jackson, ‘Arminian Edification: Kierkegaard on Grace and Free Will’, in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), 235–56. CUP2, 111. CD, 400. Jackson, ‘Arminian Edification’, 238. PC, 171. PC, 181. CUP, 138–41. JP 6:6388, p. 144 / SKS 21, NB10:185, p. 351. FT, 86.

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whom he will say: ‘I do not know you, I never knew you’, those to whom he will say this even though they insist they know him!48 None of this is to imply that Jackson’s assessment is wrong, at least not necessarily. Nor is it being suggested that Kierkegaard might more accurately be characterized as ‘consistently Calvinistic’. It is instead our job to observe how seemingly contradictory Kierkegaard was with respect to human agency. There are moments when he sounds categorically synergistic; at other times he feels decisively monergistic. Perhaps it would be accurate to paraphrase the conclusions of Schulz and Chapa regarding divine foreknowledge and appropriate them here – that in truth Kierkegaard offers us a presentation of human agency that centres on the divine absolute (on the one hand) while seeking to reify the individual’s participation in that absolute (on the other). Lee C. Barrett considers this wide range of Kierkegaard’s remarks on human responsibility and argues for a contextual reading, so that Kierkegaard is not synergistic, monergistic or Arminian, but sounds these themes for different rhetorical purposes.49 Again, Kierkegaard’s affirmation of both human as well as divine agency is all part of that doctrinal inheritance described above, and it is this inheritance that operates in the background of his approximating a theology of providence.

III. FEATURES OF KIERKEGAARD’S UNDERSTANDING OF PROVIDENCE What have we established so far? First, although Kierkegaard shirked a dogmatic treatment of providence, we can still find enthusiastic appraisals of pertinent scriptural teachings; second, we might wish to draw some parallels between him and the thoughts of his contemporaries (whether that thinking be scholarly or doxological in nature); and third, Kierkegaard was bequeathed certain doctrinal categories, each of which interact with (and impact upon) an account of divine governance. But what of Kierkegaard’s own approximation? It is clear he held the subject in high regard. Recall the following statement from later in life: ‘To be a Christian means to believe in a special providence.’50 In what way might we construct an understanding of Kierkegaard’s theology of divine governance? Our approach will be threefold: Kierkegaard’s theology of providence is ‘Described Incidentally, Known Experientially, and Refracted Christologically’. As is only right, let us start at the beginning.

Described Incidentally What do we mean when we say that Kierkegaard’s theology of providence is more often than not ‘described incidentally’? On the one hand, we mean to underline what was said at the beginning of this chapter: Kierkegaard does not approach this subject with the systematic enterprise in mind. One would likely leave disappointed were one to expect a fully orbed doctrine of divine governance from Kierkegaard or any of his pseudonyms.

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CD, 272–3 – emphasis added. Lee C. Barrett, ‘Christ’s Efficacious Love and Human Responsibility: The Lutheran Dialectic of “Discourses at the Communion on Fridays” ’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007), 251–72. JP 2:2083, p. 447 / SKS 26, NB36:20, p. 421.

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However, we also mean to highlight the plethora of informal appeals to ‘Governance’ strewn throughout his works. These appeals sometimes take the form of a sentence; whereas, at other times, they are exercised for several pages. We seldom find Kierkegaard devoting an entire treatise to the subject (with one very notable exception), but to ignore these incidental descriptions would be to bite the hand that feeds. What is especially notable is just how traditional many of Kierkegaard’s appeals to providence are. It is often surprising to read him describe divine governance in such robust, comprehensive and meticulous terms. Take a moment to imagine a ‘high’ theology of providence. What might it look like? Perhaps it might position God as the ultimate cause of a person’s welfare – from the significant (e.g. one’s span of years, career, wealth, etc.) to the relatively insignificant (e.g. accidents of circumstance). It might also attribute to God a certain amount of control (e.g. over nature and history). An especially high doctrine of providence might also cite God as the ultimate cause of calamity and as sovereign even over human evil. We might stereotypically expect to find such descriptions in the works of Reformed scholasticism, and yet we discover all of the above in Kierkegaard’s approach to divine governance. Consider God’s control over the natural world. Even if we are faithless, he still remains faithful. When he walked here on earth, no sufferer came to him without finding help, no troubled person ever went away from him uncomforted, no sick person ever touched the hem of his cloak without being healed (Mk. 6.56) . . . No, heaven will become weary of carrying the stars and will cast them away before he becomes weary of forgiving and thrusts the penitent away from himself.51 Kierkegaard describes the elements (such as the wind) as being in the hands of this ‘higher Governance’.52 Even animal life subsists within the careful, providential measure of heaven.53 Calamity and suffering, too, is given a purpose under governance. Pay close attention to the following prayer: Father in heaven, how well we know that seeking always has its promise; how much the more, then, seeking you, the giver of all the promises and of all good gifts! How well we know that the seeker does not always need to wander out into the world, because the more holy that is which he seeks, the closer it is to him, and if he seeks you, O God, you are closest of all to him! But we also know that seeking always has its toil and its spiritual trial – how much more, then, the terror in seeking you, you Mighty One! If even the person who in thought puts his trust in his kinship, if even he with his thought does not without terror venture out into those decisions when he through doubt seeks your footprint in the wise order of existence, when he through despair seeks your footprint in the obedience of rebellious events to a providence . . . how then does the sinner dare to seek you, you righteous God! But that is why he does not seek you as these do, but he seeks you in the confession of sins.54

51 52 53 54

CD, 285. EO1, 357. CD, 22–3. TDIO, 9 – emphasis added. Kierkegaard’s prayer is (at first glance) somewhat difficult to follow. In essence, he is (a) extolling God’s faithfulness towards the seeker; (b) sketching the virtuous seeker of God (who would seek God’s footprint in the ‘wise order of existence’ and indeed ‘in the obedience of rebellious events to a providence’); (c) observing how even that seeker approaches God with doubt and despair; and (d) asking how the sinner could then dare to seek God at all, if even the virtuous endure doubt and despair. Kierkegaard’s answer is simple: they can seek God in the confession of sin, trusting in Christ.

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Such a description of God’s providence is not just teleological, crediting ‘Governance’ with the good gifts of creation and the wisdom of this created order, but it also explains the dysteleological – the rebellious, evil and calamitous. Recall our walk with Kierkegaard through 2 Samuel 11–12. There he says of Uriah’s death: ‘There must be a Governance’. It is also nothing he was unwilling to say of himself, suggesting that despite intending (after the publication of his Concluding Unscientific Postscript) to ‘withdraw to the country’, God in his governance ‘came to my assistance again’.55 Although Kierkegaard describes his original intentions as sinful, even suggesting that God would have had reason to be ‘disgusted’ at him, Kierkegaard paints a picture of the providential restoration of a thing purposed for evil. Kierkegaard would soon provide eschatological colour to this individual example: ‘[Just] as every beginning is to be referred to God, and every ending, so here at the end may the beginning and the end be referred to God.’56 Even accidents of circumstance are attributed to the purposes of providence. When Kierkegaard wrote to a friend, Peter Michael Stilling, in December 1849, he speaks of his hope that governance might cause them to bump into one another again.57 Ever the romantic, Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms also describe the ebbs and flows of flirting as subject to the hand of God,58 such that providence might cause one to ‘talk love’ with a girl. God might even send a wind to blow behind one’s back so as to facilitate companionship on a long walk. (‘Blow more gently now, please! . . . There is a higher governance that comes to the aid of love; that is why the man has the wind in his favour.’59) If in the small, then also in the large – our span of years is said to have been portioned to us in accordance with divine governance;60 it is divine governance that determines whether a person’s legacy proves significant to future generations,61 and it is divine governance that constitutes our ‘hidden benefactor’ regardless of whether we live in wealth or poverty.62 [Every] human being is in debt to him, and eternally in debt. Alas, the debt someone incurs at the gambling table, by throwing dice, in a game of cards, is called a debt of honor; I suppose that because it is meaningless in itself we have to give it an impressive name and then hurry to be rid of it. The debt to God is not a debt of honor like that, but it is, nevertheless, an honor to be in debt to God. It is an honor not to owe fortune anything, but to owe God everything; not to owe fate anything, but to owe providence everything; not to owe caprice anything, but to owe a fatherliness everything.63 These descriptions of providence might be incidental; it may not be Kierkegaard’s primary intention to examine governance as a special dogmatic locus. His meaning, however, could not be clearer. Every human being alive owes providence everything, from matters of great import to relatively insignificant fare. As surprising as it might be for us as modern readers of Kierkegaard, we are here presented with a robust and meticulous conceptualization of divine governance, even as he elsewhere resists what he might have regarded as the deterministic excesses of previous centuries.

55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

JP 6:6157, p. 9 / SKS 20, NB5:51, p. 393. PC, 306. LD, 241. SLW, 303. EO1, 357. LD, 213 and SLW, 60. CUP, 147. CD, 33. EUD, 400.

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Known Experientially Interpreting providence has long been a controversial exercise. Following the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755, Voltaire famously penned his Poéme sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756) as well as Candide ou l’Optimisme (1759). In both cases he attacked various ecclesiastical movements of his day towards theodicy, attempting to savage the notion that the Lisbon earthquake (in which tens of thousands of people perished) occurred within this ‘best of all possible worlds’. More recently, Christians in Minneapolis debated the significance of a 2009 tornado that damaged a building of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. This same twister defaced a steeple even as members debated the ordination of those in same-sex relationships to pastoral ministry. Some interpreted the event as the wind of the Holy Spirit; others as a judgement of an angry providence.64 Despite affirming the importance of divine governance, Kierkegaard was wary of how it might be abused. ‘To regard every light breeze of the times as a hint from Governance’, he says, ‘is either a jest (and as such quite amusing at times) or it is earnestness, and as such a nonsensical jest, and the more nonsensical the more complete the lunacy is’.65 Discussing the existence of God, Climacus disputes the possibility of providing demonstrable proof purely from the suggestion of providence all around us: ‘Or are the wisdom in nature and the goodness or wisdom in Governance right in front of our noses?’66 Kierkegaard resists a simplistic species of theological inference, one that extrapolates from observable phenomena a certainty about God’s intentions. It is not that we cannot experience providence; we most certainly do, according to Kierkegaard. Again, to quote Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, we ‘owe providence everything’. It is also not the case that we cannot conclude specific things about God’s character from our experience of providence. Again, we ‘owe a fatherliness everything’. Speaking from within the context of Luther’s theology, it is the difference between a theologia crucis and a theologia gloriae,67 between participating in a divine reality described by revelation and extrapolating from that reality truths in excess of revealed description. Kierkegaard is keen to protect the

64

65 66 67

For more, see Ted Olsen, ‘ELCA Assembly: Was God in Either Whirlwind? Tornado Touches Convention Center as Lutherans Approve Sexuality Statement by the Exact Margin It Needed to Pass’, Christianity Today, 20 August 2009. Available online: http://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2009/august/133.41.0.html (accessed 22 February 2018). P, 43. PF, 42. This dynamic is easily located in Theses 19–20 of Luther’s ‘The Heidelberg Disputation’: ‘That person does not deserve to be called a theologian who looks upon the invisible things of God as though they were clearly perceptible in those things which have actually happened . . . He deserves to be called a theologian, however, who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross’. Martin Luther, ‘The Heidelberg Disputation’, in Luther’s Works, vol. 31: Career of the Reformer I, ed. Harold J. Grimm and Helmut T. Lehmann (St Louis, MO: Fortress Press, 1957 [1518]), 39–58 [52]. On this dynamic, see also Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1963), 27: ‘The theology of glory and the theology of the cross each have implications for both. Natural theology and speculative metaphysics which seek to know God from the works of creation are in the same category as the work righteousness of the moralist. Both are ways in which man exalts himself to the level of God.’ Also consider Gerhard Forde’s comment on Thesis 19 of the Heidelberg Disputation: ‘But why should one who operates in that fashion not deserve to be called a theologian? Is this not the business of theology, to figure out the logic of God and his action in the world? This is precisely where the great divide becomes apparent. One who proposes to “see through” creation and divine action actually ends by dissolving the power of the cross in a sea of abstract universals and consequently undercutting the present actuality of the word and of the cross.’ Gerhard Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans,1997), 73.

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integrity of an experience of providence not by denying its veracity or by stopping to enjoy its meaning but by denying those who would indulge in reductive speculations. There is a reason why Kierkegaard was keen to protect a person’s experience of providence: put simply, he was that person. He sought to protect the integrity of providence because providence had been so sweet to him. ‘God has handled me frightfully’, he wrote in 1848, ‘but also in another sense has given me momentum, clarity, definiteness and insight and tranquility’;68 ‘In everything I undertake there is infinitely more that is the bonus of Governance’.69 There are two parts to Kierkegaard’s ‘experiential’ approach to the theology of providence. On the one hand, we must consider his vision of governance’s role in the ordo salutis and the Christian life in general. Governance is said to draw believers to Godself;70 providence is said to provoke people to believe in the first place and plays a definite role in preserving believers in this difficult and imperfect world;71 and it is divine governance ruling over the cause of the Gospel even in the face of apparent defeat and humiliation.72 Kierkegaard appears to inherit Luther’s so-called ‘seventh mark of the Church’, regularly laying emphasis on the believer’s experiencing trials and tribulations in the light of a providential economy. He posits the ‘kindliness’ of governance creating opportunities for ‘true self-denial’;73 he depicts governance leading him into discomfort and opposition;74 he paints governance as like that refiner’s fire (described in Mal. 3.3) leading one to be ‘tested like gold’,75 and he wrote in 1846 about how governance ‘has encouraged my endeavor continuously’ often through ‘spiritual suffering’.76 Providence is fatherly; it is wise and it is kind; but in Kierkegaard’s reckoning it is also responsible for testing. It can function forensically, examining a person’s intentions.77 It can also function correctively, so as to deny one an ambition through adversity.78 Kierkegaard even plays with the notion that governance might act penally, so as to ‘strike a person’.79 It is in self-reflection, however, that we see Kierkegaard’s model of providence come to life.

68 69 70 71

72

CD, 424. CD, 425. PC, 151–262. ‘Whoever believes that there is a God and also a providence has an easier time (in preserving the faith), an easier time in definitely gaining the faith (and not an illusion) in an imperfect world, where passion is kept vigilant, than in an absolutely perfect world. In such a world, faith is indeed conceivable.’ CUP, 29. Kierkegaard writes, All inspiration has its source either in faith in one’s passion, or, deeper, in faith in a providence, which teaches a person that even the death of the greatest man is a jest for a providence that has legions of angels in reserve, and that he therefore should go resolutely to his death and leave his good cause to providence and his posthumous reputation to the poet. SLW, 411.

73 74 75

JFY, 205. CD, 400. Kierkegaard writes, It depends upon Governance – but let us never forget that it is love – however tight it will turn the screws on him, if I may put it this way, and however hot it will heat the oven, if I may put it this way, in which the youth must be tested like gold. Perhaps he as yet is a long way from having fully assessed the truth of the matter, for Governance is love, and even if this ordeal is in earnest, there is nothing cruel in its earnestness; it handles a person gently and never tries a person beyond his ability. PC, 190.

76 77 78 79

CUP2, 111. E.g. PC, 221–2. CD, 157. EUD, 47.

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But it is not really to my credit; it is Governance who has held me in rein with the help of an extreme depression and a troubled conscience . . . Just one wish for this endeavor of mine if I happen to be separated from it. I live in the faith that God will place the accent of Governance on the life of an extremely unhappy, humanly understood, man who nevertheless by the help of God has felt incredibly blessed.80 We hear that accent of ‘Governance’ in many of Kierkegaard’s autobiographical notes. Providence was present in his conflict with Mynster,81 in his friendships,82 in causing him to outlive his Father83 and even in his struggles with mental health.84 Kierkegaard’s entire career is self-cast as a heavenly drama, whereby his intellectual reflections are attributed to the ‘bonus of Governance’,85 his interests are broadened and radicalized according to the works of governance,86 and of the publication of his manuscripts he concludes: ‘Governance has arranged it this way for me.’87 All of these autobiographical odes to providence are mostly sounded incidentally, just as before, but with one exception. The Point of View (posthumously published in 1859) contains a chapter entitled ‘Governance’s Part in My Authorship’. It is the closest we get to a full treatment of the subject from Kierkegaard’s own hand. It does not amount to a systematic appraisal of God’s providence. Instead, we discover a celebration of divine assistance, a doxology, even. Kierkegaard goes so far as to call his relationship with governance ‘a true love story’.88 In a sense, ‘Governance’s Part in My Authorship’ certainly sounds some already familiar notes – for example, Kierkegaard observes God’s provision in the depression he suffered from childhood and paints himself as one ‘shackled’ and ‘curbed’ by divine governance.89 He also discusses the personal impact of his Father’s death and depicts the relationship between his own intellectual life and providence as like a stringed instrument and a musician.90 Of the assistance of God’s providence, however,

80 81 82 83

JP 6:6238, pp. 47–8 / SKS, NB6:74, p. 56. JP 6:6171, pp. 14–15 / SKS, NB5:77, p. 404. LD, 141. From a letter to his brother, dated 19 May 1847, Dear Peter, the birthday on which you congratulate me and about which you say that it ‘often and uncustomarily has been in your thoughts these days’, that birthday has also frequently and for a long time preceding it been in my own thoughts. For I became 34 years old. In a certain sense it was utterly expected. I was already very surprised when – yes, now I may say it without fear of upsetting you – you became 34 years old. Both Father and I had the idea that nobody in our family would live past his 34th year. However little I otherwise agreed with Father, in a few singular ideas we had an essential point of contact . . . The 34th year was, then, to be the limit, and Father was to outlive us all. That is not the way it has turned out – I am now in my 35th year . . . I can only say this much – that from the beginning, with sufferings which perhaps few can imagine because I was given strength to conceal them, I acknowledge more and more happily that Governance has granted me infinitely more than I had ever expected. LD, 212–13.

84 85 86 87 88 89 90

CUP2, 148. CD, 425. JP 6:6388, p. 144 / SKS 21, NB10:185, p. 351. JP 5:6125, p. 441 / SKS 20, NB4:118, p. 346. PV, 71. PV, 79–86. Kierkegaard writes, Familiar as I was with the inner suffering involved in becoming a Christian and rigorously brought up in it, I almost missed the other side of the matter. Here Governance assisted and assisted in such a way that the outcome of what I did truly benefited me and my cause, so that, to compare intellectual endowment to a stringed instrument, I not only remained in tune but gained an extra string on my instrument. PV, 89.

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Kierkegaard is categorical that ‘Governance has brought me up’.91 With this in mind he is led to characterize God in three different ways. First, the assistance of ‘Governance’ showed him God as Master. Despite experiencing ‘outbursts of genius’ he says he only ever ‘played the master’ – in all things he believed himself mastered by the King of Heaven.92 ‘Without God I am too strong for myself ’; this is how Kierkegaard described his own intellectual energy. He threw himself on ‘Governance’ as his only source of succour. The assistance of ‘Governance’ also showed him God as Teacher – instructing him to hold the pen properly and write each sentence just right, leading him to prayer and thankful reflection.93 Finally, God’s providential assistance displayed to Kierkegaard a divine confidant, leading him to model his own powers of reasoning after the divine ratio. Such powers are said to have derived from God’s ‘co-knowledge’, so that the former subsists within the latter. In his providence God endured what Kierkegaard endured, he knows what he knew and he perceives what he perceived. In this truth Kierkegaard found ‘blessedness’ such that he might ‘trustingly rest in confidence in God’s co-knowledge’.94 Governance was present from the very beginning, a fellow traveller and witness to Kierkegaard’s many peaks and troughs. Governance is also to thank for everything, going so far as to explain Kierkegaard’s various insights.

Refracted Christologically We have approached Kierkegaard’s theology of providence through his many robust (but incidental) descriptions of God’s governance. We have seen how these theological descriptions emerge from a deep wellspring of personal experience as well as a prayerful gratitude for God’s steadfastness. As we approach a conclusion, it might finally be helpful to consider Kierkegaard’s musings on the Christ-event. Let us be clear: beyond the passing incidental mention Kierkegaard himself never made the connection between divine governance and the Christ-event. It is proposed here as one possible means of understanding Kierkegaard’s theology of providence. Or rather, it is offered as a shortcut through which we might identify some of the possible assumptions behind such a theology. We should recall how Kierkegaard was keen to preserve providence against those who would reduce it to a proof of divine existence, or to a simplistic declaration of God’s intentions. At stake was whether God in se could be deduced from mere phenomena – divine attributes from accidents, the story of salvation from circumstance, heavenly intention from sheer coincidence. We find a similar dynamic at work in ‘The Halt’ (part of Practice in Christianity, published in 1850). Anti-Climacus discusses the possibility of gaining knowledge about Christ from history. His answer is simple: ‘No’. Or rather, No. Why not? Because one cannot know anything at all about Christ; he is the paradox, the object of faith, exists only for faith. But all historical communication is the communication of knowledge; consequently one can come to know nothing about Christ from history. For if one comes to know little or much or something about him, he is not the one he in truth is. Thus one comes to know something about him that is different from what he is. One comes to know nothing about him or one comes to know something incorrect about him – one is deceived. History makes Christ into someone else than 91 92 93 94

PV, 77. PV, 74. PV, 73–4. PV, 75–6.

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he is in truth, and thus from history we come to know much about – Christ? No, not about Christ, for about him nothing can be known; he can only be believed.95 With the Christ-event in mind, Anti-Climacus states that it is impossible to conclude from the results of a human existence ‘that ergo it was God’.96 Like with providence, Kierkegaard is not failing to believe in the Christ-event. Neither does he think there are no benefits to be gained from considering it. Rather, he is affirming the event as paradox; as perceived by faith, God enters his own creation. But this is not a truth arrived at by phenomenological deduction alone. Just as it is impossible to read ‘glory’ on the face of the historical Jesus, so it is with providence and reductive inferences. In handling phenomena (historical or indeed current) we must not be so conceited, says Anti-Climacus, as to do what the Father alone will do: ‘to array Christ in glory, clothing him in the glittering trappings of results, as if this were the second coming’.97 Kierkegaard’s approximation of a theology of providence follows a similar trajectory. It assumes the same paradox of faith: namely, that through this tear in the veil of circumstance, divine governance is at work. The irony is that as soon as we seek to apprehend this work by any other means than that paradox of faith, it becomes an idol, a means of stealing the glory of Christ by assuming it to be ‘right in front of our noses’.

CONCLUSION Jules Verne’s Axel was rescued in the end, by the way. Upon being discovered by his Uncle and fellow travellers, he offered thanks to God for leading him through the labyrinthine darkness to a point where the voices of rescue might be heard. Again, we find a parallel with Kierkegaard. In his own words, Kierkegaard’s approximation of a theology of providence was more like a love story than it was a matter of doctrinal abstraction. Perceived through the paradox of faith, he embraced divine governance as responsible for romance and accident, life and death, career and fortune. Providence is to thank for all things – but insofar as it is definitive of Godself, it is also loving and fatherly. Kierkegaard offered prayers of thanks for his rescue via ‘Governance’ in his own dark days, for bringing him through seasons of depression and humiliation. It is fair to say that Kierkegaard is now received as a genius. Incredibly prolific, his genius touched a great many subjects. However, it is telling that when it comes to the subject of providence, he had just one regret: Lest these few direct words about myself personally and about my authorship might in any way be a breach of, a weakness in relation to, what I myself have hitherto understood, namely, that I was committed to silence concerning myself personally and concerning direct communication about my authorship. In this regard, everything is in order and proper, even the little I have here communicated directly to you, I have not communicated, although from one side, without concern, without the concern that from this side unconditionally preoccupies me most – that I in some way might have said too much about myself and too little about Governance.98

95 96 97 98

PC, 25 – emphasis added. PC, 28. PC, 31. CUP2, 148 – emphasis added.

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FURTHER READING Chapa, Joseph O. ‘Reformed Soteriology in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments’. Journal of Reformed Theology 10 (2016): 129–47. Haynes, Daniel F. ‘Kierkegaard and Providence’. MA diss., George Washington Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University, Waco, TX, 2004. Jackson, Timothy P. ‘Arminian Edification: Kierkegaard on Grace and Free Will’. In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, edited by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, 235–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Mulder, Jack, Jr. ‘Governance / Providence’. In Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Envy to Incognito, edited by Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, 113–18. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15: tome III. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2014. Schulz, Heiko. ‘Kierkegaard on Providence and Foreknowledge’. Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 41, no. 2 (1999): 115–31.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Creation: By, For and Before God ANDREW B. TORRANCE

INTRODUCTION Creation is not a major theme in Kierkegaard’s writings. Indeed, for those familiar with Kierkegaard, it may be surprising to find a chapter on creation in a companion to his theology. However, when one explores his writings with an eye to discern his views about creation, we discover that he held a deep admiration for the natural order as created, governed and belonging to God. At the outset, it is worth saying something about the concept of ‘creation’. Due to the process-product ambiguity, the term ‘creation’ is open to interpretation. It denotes a creative act, a creative event and a created product. Rather than bemoaning this ambiguity and opting for a more precise definition of creation in this chapter, I shall embrace this ambiguity. By working with the broad usage of this term, as it is variously defined, we are given much more scope for reflecting on Kierkegaard’s vision of creation. So where does one first turn to develop an account of Kierkegaard’s understanding of creation? A superficial trawl through his writings does not bear much fruit. One might think she has hit gold when coming across the discourse, ‘Think about Your Creator in the Days of Your Youth’.1 However, as one reads this homily, it quickly becomes apparent that it offers very little insight into a doctrine of creation. Upon digging a little deeper below the surface of Kierkegaard’s writings, we can begin to notice allusions to his thoughts on various features of creation. Then, if we go beyond his formal writings and look into his journals and notebooks, we find a good scattering of reflections on creation – personal, theological and philosophical. What makes the journals and notebooks particularly helpful is that they provide us with some insight into what is going on in the mind of Kierkegaard during his official authorship. In light of Kierkegaard’s patchy engagement with the doctrine of creation per se, much of what I shall be doing in this chapter is piecing together fragments to try to present a more integrated picture of his theology of creation. As I do so, I shall draw attention to five aspects of his thought that pertain to his doctrine of creation: 1. his commitment to the doctrine of creation out of nothing 2. his account of God as the power who established creation

1

EUD, 233–51.

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3. his perception of the beauty of creation 4. his account of human uniqueness 5. his critique of the natural sciences Looking at these aspects will bring us to discover a profound understanding of the world as a creation that is purposefully created, defined and governed by the transcendent creator. Cognizant of the loving nature of God’s creative activity, we shall find that Kierkegaard held a deep appreciation for the goodness and beauty of creation. At the same time, we shall also notice an awareness of the fallenness of creation, particularly as he attends to humanity’s despairing venture to resist its created nature. Nonetheless, this awareness does not diminish Kierkegaard’s cognizance of the goodness of creation. His knowledge of human rebellion is overshadowed by a hope and joy in the fact that the creator came to be with creation, to be at one with creation in Jesus Christ, and thereby reconcile creation into loving relationship with himself. For Kierkegaard, ‘[c]reation is [really] only completed when God includes himself in it’.2

I. CREATION OUT OF NOTHING Kierkegaard always had Hegelianism in his sights. In particular, he was committed to critiquing what he saw to be a Hegelian confusion of God with the world, which he associated with pantheism.3 A decisive teaching for addressing this confusion is the doctrine of creation out of nothing.4 In alignment with traditional Christian orthodoxy, he viewed this doctrine as foundational to maintaining the absolute difference between God and creatures. As well as making clear the creator/creature distinction, this doctrine also helps to make it plain that every facet of created existence is dependent on and objectively defined by God. It asserts that, in every respect, God is Lord over creation.5 And, when this is affirmed with a recognition that God is the wholly benevolent Lord, whose activity corresponds to his essential goodness, this doctrine supports the conclusion that creation is ‘all very good’.6 As that which God lovingly wills into existence, creation lives and moves and has its being as a reflection of God’s love. Its existence is grounded in the love of God such that ‘every one of [God’s] works seems to bear the appendage: Praise, thank, worship the Creator’.7 Creation is the beloved of God that finds its true identity in loving conformity to its creator. By creating that which is other than himself, God brings into existence that which has self-definition: that which is distinguished from God in itself. For most of creation, this self-definition simply flows from its createdness; most created objects are simply distinguished from God by the fact that they have been created out of nothing. But then, in their otherness, they live as beings who are true to their nature, as it has been determined by God; they cannot make self-conscious choices to define themselves otherwise. For

2 3 4

5

6 7

KJN 6, p. 176 / SKS 22, NB12:63, p. 177. CUP, 122–3 / SKS 7, 117–18. While he makes very little reference to this doctrine in his formally published writings, his deep respect for this doctrine is clear from his journals and notebooks. Kierkegaard writes, ‘A beautiful word to express that all creation serves but one Lord and looks only to One: uni-versum (The universe).’ KJN 5, p. 332 / SKS 21, NB10:124, p. 321. CD, 291 / SKS 10, 313. CD, 291 / SKS 10, 313.

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human beings, however, the situation is very different. The otherness they experience comes with an ability to betray God and, in an act of despair, seek to define themselves apart from God. They have the ability to turn against their nature and fail to be who they truly are. As I discuss further below, Kierkegaard holds that God creates human beings with a volition that allowed them to behave as though they are lords over their existence, as though they are creators of their identities. He insisted that God ‘refuses to intervene forcibly’ in their life-journeys.8 This gives them the possibility of either taking offence at both God and their createdness, or choosing to conform to his creative purposes. If, on the one hand, a person chooses to take offence at God, thereby denying his created nature, he becomes caught up in a life of sin: a state of imprisonment in which he ‘holds himself captive’.9 By so doing, he looks to himself, as if he were Lord and creator and, denying his createdness, creates the wrong existence for himself. He chooses a life of unfreedom.10 If, on the other hand, a person chooses to embrace his createdness before God, then he engages in ‘the true worship of God’.11 By so doing, not only does he praise, thank and worship God by his created existence but also with the choices he makes within that existence. He chooses to be true to his created nature, to who he is. Kierkegaard viewed it as a testimony to ‘the wondrousness of creation’ that God would create beings who could choose their identities – beings who do not concur with God by natural instinct but by voluntary choice.12 By creating such beings, God makes it possible to have a reciprocal relationship with those creatures.13 To be clear, this relationship is not a symmetrical relationship between equals. And Kierkegaard was adamant that the reciprocal nature of this relationship did not compromise God’s aseity.14 For him, the omnipotence of God is such that God can create out of nothing without becoming ‘ensconced in a relationship to another’; in his omnipotence, God ‘can give without giving up the least bit of its power’.15 How is this possible? Kierkegaard did not think he could begin to explain how God creates such an arrangement. He notes that it is ‘inconceivable’ that God can create ‘a being that is independent vis-à-vis omnipotence’: that ‘omnipotence, with its mighty hand, can take hold of the world so powerfully and can also make itself so light that what has been brought into being has independence’.16 But what he does say is that it is made possible by an act of creation out of nothing.

8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16

JP 2:1450, p. 153 / SKS 26, NB34:29, pp. 340–1. PF, 17 / SKS 4, 226. PF, 17 / SKS 4, 226. CUP, 246 / SKS 7, 223. CUP, 246–7 / SKS 7, 224. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus writes, ‘Nature, the totality of creation, is God’s work, and yet God is not there, but within the individual human being there is a possibility (he is Spirit according to his possibility) that in inwardness is awakened to a God-relationship, and then it is possible to see God everywhere.’ CUP, 246–7 / SKS 7, 224. Climacus ponders that the god ‘must move himself and continue to be what Aristotle says of him, άκίνητος πάντα κινεῖ [unmoved, he moves all]. But if he moves himself, then there of course is no need that moves him, as if he himself could not endure silence but was compelled to burst into speech. But if he moves himself and is not moved by need, what moves him then but love, for love does not have the satisfaction of need outside itself but within.’ PF, 24 / SKS 4, 231. KJN 4, p. 57 / SKS 20, NB:69, p. 58. KJN 4, p. 57 / SKS 20, NB:69, p. 58.

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[I]f a [human] being had the least bit of independent existence vis-à-vis God beforehand (with respect to materia), he [God] could not make him free. Creation out of nothing is, once again, an expression of the capacity of omnipotence to make someone independent. He to whom I owe absolutely everything – even while he has just as absolutely retained everything – this is the person who has in fact made me independent. If in creating a [human] being God himself had lost a little of his power, he would indeed be unable to make a [human] being independent.17 To return to a previous point, Kierkegaard’s commitment to the doctrine of creation out of nothing lent support to his critique of the Hegelian philosophy that he believed was distorting Danish theology. For example, he has this philosophy in mind when he notes: the idea that ‘God could create beings who are free in relation to himself is the cross that philosophy could not bear but upon which it has remained hanging’.18 The doctrine of creation out of nothing calls for a recognition that there is no human philosophy that can include within it an adequate representation of the eternal God, who is beyond human reason. As such, one of the key features of Hegelianism that Kierkegaard sought to critique was its overconfidence in the human ability to comprehend God: to incorporate God into a systematic understanding of the world-historical process in which ‘God does not play the role of the Lord’.19 For him, Hegel’s philosophy invited a certain lack of respect for God – a lack of fear and trembling. Instead of a transcendent God, God was viewed as someone who could be made at home in the bourgeois culture of Denmark. The customary Christianity of Denmark was a testimony to the Hegelian perception that God could be known in and through human culture.20 Aside from the doctrinal difficulties with such a theology, Kierkegaard also saw this theology as inviting a forgetfulness of God’s transcendence. For Kierkegaard, when a culture becomes desensitized to God’s transcendence, it can become all too easy for that culture to confuse God with creaturely objects and phenomena. As a result, persons can start to confuse their lives before God with their lives before creation. Not only does this lead to a forgetfulness of God qua creator, but also to a more general forgetfulness of createdness. Creation becomes something that is not objectively defined by the creator but by the imagination of the creatures who live within it. Human beings come to perceive creation as something that can be known on its own terms (or, more precisely, on their own terms) as an end in itself – as a self-defining natural order rather than a divinely defined creation. In turn, when theology is done under these circumstances, God becomes a projection of human beliefs, and theology becomes mythology – ‘mythology in the proper sense[, which] is the creation of God in human form’.21 In view of this dynamic, Kierkegaard implores, ‘Recall that you are created in his image and according to his likeness, and this is the highest and the most glorious thing that can be said – and you wilfully and arbitrarily want to create him in your image and

17 18 19

20

21

KJN 4, p. 57 / SKS 20, NB:69, p. 58. KJN 2, p. 95 / SKS 18, FF:149, p. 103. CUP, 156 / SKS 7, 173. Kierkegaard writes, ‘Father in heaven! You are incomprehensible in your creation; you live afar off in a light which no one can penetrate, and even if you are recognized in your providence, our knowledge is still only weak and obscures your clarity. But you are still more incomprehensible in your grace and mercy.’ JP 3:3409, pp. 561–2 / SKS 27, Papir 340, p. 355. Commenting on Hegelianism, Climacus writes, ‘In the world-historical process, God is metaphysically laced in a half-metaphysical, half-esthetic-dramatic, conventional corset, which is immanence.’ CUP, 156 / SKS 7, 173. JP 3:2700, p. 190 / SKS 27, Papir 200, p. 154.

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form him according to your likeness.’22 While the danger of persons forgetting their createdness is not always an explicit concern in Kierkegaard’s writings, it is nonetheless an underlying concern that is tied to his emphasis on divine transcendence. And, for him, the doctrine of creation out of nothing is particularly apt for clarifying the proper place of creation before the eternal God.

II. THE POWER THAT ESTABLISHED CREATION As we have just seen, Kierkegaard was clear that it is only God who determines the true nature of creation. And, for him, God determines that creation should have a fixed purpose: one that is not ‘up to creation’ but defined by the love of God.23 The main place where he addresses God’s purposive creativity is in The Sickness unto Death. Here, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Anti-Climacus offers an extended discussion of what it means to be a self. And, for him, the self has a particular nature that is defined according to ‘the power that established it’: God the creator.24 In complete contrast to the secular forms of existentialism that would come later, Kierkegaard was committed to a theological definition of human existence. He believed that the task of the true self was not to create its own distinctive identity but to become the self it was created to be.25 In Anti-Climacus’s words, it is futile to attempt to define oneself apart ‘from the power that established it’.26 This is because, no matter how hard a person tries to recreate himself (tries to define himself by his own hopes and dreams), and no matter how much a person might believe he has successfully done so, his true self will always be defined ‘by that directly before which it is a self ’, which will always be ‘the power that established it’.27 For Kierkegaard, a person’s created nature always holds true; it cannot be lost, even if a person embraces a life that is seemingly ignorant of his createdness.28

22

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24 25

26 27 28

KJN 1, pp. 267–8 / SKS 17, DD:198a, p. 276. To point beyond the theme of creation, for Kierkegaard, there is only one anthropocentric turn at the heart of Christianity: God assuming human form in the incarnation. In Jesus Christ (the ‘God-man’), the creator assumes createdness and thereby gives the world the foremost revelation of who the creator is. But, to be clear, this does not give human beings the ability to know God qua creator. It simply gives human beings the capacity to know who God is for us. Anti-Climacus writes, ‘In paganism, man made god a man (the man-god); in Christianity God makes himself man (the God-man).’ SUD, 126 / SKS 11, 237. Kierkegaard associates the contentment that creation makes for itself, apart from God, with an ‘arbitrary merit’. He writes, ‘[a self-made contentment] is a sign of your miserable state that only witnesses against you! There is really nothing in the wide world that is able (no more than the whole world is able) to compensate a person for the harm he would inflict on his soul if he gave up the thought of God’. EUD, 235 / SKS 5, 235. SUD, 14 / SKS 11, 130. This meant that Kierkegaard denied that true freedom was to be found by focusing on ‘freedom of choice’; indeed, he believed such focus leads to ‘the loss of freedom’. KJN 7, pp. 62–3 / SKS 23, NB15:93, pp. 64–5. In agreement with Augustine, he insisted that ‘abstract freedom of choice (liberum arbitrium) is a phantasy’, and alongside Gottfried W. Leibniz and Pierre Bayle he asserted ‘a perfectly disinterested will (equilibrium) is a nothing, a chimera’. JP 2:1268, p. 59 / SKS 24, NB23:170, p. 287. Concrete human freedom is not grounded in a state of being equally disposed to go one way or another. Human lives are swayed by their subjective content; indeed, in one journal entry Kierkegaard notes that this content is ‘so decisive’ that a person can only ever choose to go one way. KJN 7, pp. 62–3 / SKS 23, NB15:93, pp. 64–5. For him, true human freedom is realized by aligning with the order for which God established creation. Any so-called ‘freedom’ to choose between obeying and disobeying God is, in actual fact, a ‘freedom’ to choose between freedom and unfreedom, between humanity and inhumanity, between truth and untruth. SUD, 20 / SKS 11, 136. SUD, 20–1, 79–80 / SKS 11, 136–7, 193–4. SUD, 20–1 / SKS 11, 136–7.

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This criterion for selfhood is particularly evident in Anti-Climacus’s account of the self as ‘a self directly before God’: a self that is defined according to the purposiveness of its creator. For Anti-Climacus, the creator’s criteria are definitive for determining what it means to be a ‘vital’ and ‘healthy’ self, irrespective of whether or not a person is conscious of her createdness.29 God’s definition of what it means to be human is objective and cannot be swayed by human caprice. True human identity finds its home in a life of faith in which ‘the self in being itself and in willing to be itself rests [grunder] transparently in God’.30 In Kierkegaard’s own words, ‘[j]ust like the arrow of the skilled archer that, as it streaks away from the bowstring, won’t allow itself to rest before it has struck its target, so also is the [human] being created by God to set his sights on God, and finds no rest before he rests in God.’31 To be clear, however, neither Kierkegaard nor Anti-Climacus believed that the rest a person finds in God makes life in this world physically or mentally restful (according to a person’s baser instincts). Resting in God brings an experience of struggle in this world. By becoming who she was created to be, a person will find herself at odds with the fallen patterns of the world, which shape the dominant trends in society. This is because, by failing to correspond to God’s creative purposes, the preponderance of human beings have settled into a way of life that may feel comfortable in this world but is, in actual fact, characterized by despair – which Anti-Climacus defines as the ‘sickness unto death’ (Jn 11.4). By falling into sin, human beings find themselves pursuing life in non-life-giving ends. Analogously, they think they are breathing a healthy air when they are actually breathing an air that is gradually suffocating them. They are caught up in a way of existing that is ‘dead’ to God and which is in ‘the state of deepest spiritual wretchedness’.32 In short, they have fallen into a forgetfulness of their creator. As a result, they find themselves on a path to death: death being the condition that results from seeking life where there is none (i.e. apart from the creator). By coming to faith, however, a person is cured from the despair of sin by dying to her untrue self (her self that embraces sin) and entering into a relationship with the one who gives her life.33 In fellowship with her creator, she discovers a sense of belonging and worth that is not enjoyed by the person who lives as though she were a mere accident of history. She finds a renewed sense of kinship by learning that she is the beloved child of her creator. Reflecting on this experience, Kierkegaard writes, ‘when I go out under the heavens’ vault and see the many stars – then I do not, after all, feel myself a stranger in this vast world – for of course it is my father’s. Still less do I feel myself abandoned in face of life’s changes, its wretchedness, for indeed my father’s eyes are always upon me’.34 With this experience of belonging comes a desire to look to God for governance, to God’s revelation, to learn what is expected of the person who has been created to live

29

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31 32 33 34

SUD, 7–8 / SKS 11, 123; see also PV, 88–89n / SKS 16, 66–7n. As Rowan Williams puts it, ‘To discover who I am I need to discover the relation in which I stand to an active, prior Other, to a transcendent creator: I don’t first sort out who I am and then seek for resources to sustain that identity.’ Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 91. SUD, 82 / SKS 11, 196. Anti-Climacus ends The Sickness unto Death by noting that ‘the definition of faith’ is ‘in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it’. SUD, 131 / SKS 11, 242. KJN 4, p. 341 / SKS 20, NB4:116, p. 340. SUD, 6 / SKS 11, 118. SUD, 6 / SKS 11, 118. KJN 4, p. 378 / SKS 20, NB5:17, p. 378.

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within God’s creation. For Kierkegaard, a person will want to find out the house rules, as they have been decided by the divine homeowner and creator. However, the child of God realizes that God not only creates a particular home for persons who already exist, on second thought; God creates particular persons for a particular home. The person herself belongs to God, ‘not by birth but by creation out of nothing’, which means that she ‘belongs to God in every thought, the most hidden; in every feeling, the most secret; in every movement, the most inward’.35 And because she is a part of the creation that God has established, there is no other way for her to be. God has set boundaries in place that prevent human beings from being able to define their humanity for themselves. Kierkegaard writes, As God has limited a human being physically, so he has also set bounds to him in a spiritual sense . . . simply by his being a creature, one who has not created himself . . . By means of abstract imaginative thinking a person wishes to transform himself (although if this self-creation were to succeed, it would simply mean his annihilation); yet at the same time he does continue to exist [existere], to be present [at være til], and therefore it can never succeed.36 So, for Kierkegaard, ‘God’s relationship to the world is not like that of an earthly government; he has, after all, the creator’s right to demand faith and obedience from what is created, as well as that every created being in his heart dare think only all that is agreeable to him.’37 Creation is bound to God in a bond of love.38 And, as the loving creator, God determines who a person should be because God knows what is best for her in a way that totally exceeds a person’s own perception of what might be best. God’s demands upon creation are not those of a tyrant but those of a loving father or mother. In the relationship between God and creation, it is out of love that God calls creation to order. This means that a person should not seek to follow God on her own terms and for her own reasons but should seek to follow God in God’s terms and for God’s reasons. We talk about being obliged to love God by virtue of being created by God – and the only one who truly loves God is the apostle, he who in order to become an instrument is absolutely unconditionally shattered by God. To love God because he has created you is to love yourself. No, if you want to love God in truth, you must show it by gladly, adoringly letting yourself be totally shattered by God in order that he can unconditionally advance his will.39 Ever aware of the failings and weaknesses of human culture, and knowing how easy it is for human beings to lapse into attempts to define their relationship with God in their own terms, Kierkegaard insisted that creation must come to know its identity as it is and has been defined by the power who established it. It is not God who belongs to creation but creation that belongs to God. When this point is taken seriously, there is a greater obligation to attend to the plurality of ways in which God defines both what creation is and what it should be. For Kierkegaard, there can be a realization that there is much more to

35 36 37 38 39

WL, 115 / SKS 9, 118. JP 2:1348, pp. 98–9 / SKS 27, Papir 340:14, p. 358. KJN 2, p. 273 / SKS 18, JJ:470, p. 296. WL, 115 / SKS 9, 118. JP 2:2098, p. 455 / SKS 26, NB31:68, p. 51.

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creation than first meets the eye. Together with the visible order of creation, God has also created a moral order and aesthetic order.

III. THE BEAUTY OF CREATION Kierkegaard is never more lyrical than when writing on the splendour of creation. Throughout his writings, we find numerous expressions of awe and wonder at the beauty of creation – particularly in his more personal and devotional writings. Also, we find that he had an amazing ability to capture a natural scene and draw people into it. For example, In the aroma that hay always gives off, to stand just outside the gate to that little place in the late evening light; the sheep wander home and provide the foreground; dark clouds broken by the solitary patches of light that clouds have when heralding strong winds, – the heath rising in the background – – if only I might properly be able to remember the impression of this evening.40 We could spend quite a bit of time going through various passages in which Kierkegaard waxes poetic on the natural world. In so doing, we would find that there are some features of creation for which he had a particular fondness: for example, the colours of an autumn scene, a sunset or a moonlit evening.41 But we would also notice that he did not think the beauty of creation was simply in the eye of the beholder. He did not believe that real beauty could be reduced to what is immediately lovely or gratifying. He held to a theology of beauty, according to which he recognized that there is an objective beauty to creation that is determined by its creator. This beauty is one that comes to be known by the person of faith who is given to discern the natural world as creation. Through faith, a person is taken beyond her lustful infatuation and immediate enchantment with the surface of the world and comes to perceive beauty for what it really is. At the same time, Kierkegaard did believe that the surface phenomena of creation could possess both an external beauty as well as a theological beauty: a beauty that could be enjoyed by both natural sentiment and faithful contemplation. The two are not necessarily incompatible. But, again, he did believe that, before God, there is a much deeper and truer beauty to creation than that which lay on the surface. And this meant that there were some things that the aesthete might immediately view as beautiful that the faithful believer would view as being, in actual fact, ugly (and vice versa). This is particularly evident in the following journal entry, which starts out with a seemingly enthusiastic reflection on the external beauty of creation. Beautiful – indescribably beautiful – when the moonlit winter night is strangely like a fairy tale, a poem, or when the stars on a dark night twinkle in the enormous arch of the sky, or when echo waits in the still night for something to break the silence so that it can have the joy of echoing! Beautiful – rapturously beautiful, who can keep from surrendering to it – beautiful, to gaze out over the ocean, far, far into the distance, this distance which continually, captivatingly remains distance and continually seems to beckon you, so close that it invites you to let your gaze follow – into the distance.42

40 41

42

KJN 3, p. 196 / SKS 19, Notebook 6:27, p. 201. See KJN 3, p. 222 / SKS 19, Notebook 8:7, p. 226; KJN 2, p. 241 / SKS 18, JJ:367b, p. 261; JP 3:2841, p. 259 / SKS 27, Papir 343, p. 367. JP 4:5033, pp. 596–7 / SKS 26, NB32:62, p. 161.

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However, following this reflection, he asks, ‘is this looking at the world from a Christian point of view’?43 He then responds sarcastically, seeking to expose the ways in which human beings can be so very confused about the beauty of creation: Look now at the world, the human world – is it not a beautiful world, a splendid world. A splendid world, where man, created in the image of God, essentially lives to eat, drink, accumulate money – in short, occupies himself with the things which make him forget that he is created in the image of God.44 Again, to be completely clear, Kierkegaard held a deep appreciation for the external beauty of creation. But he was incredibly sensitive to how easy it is for human beings to become enraptured and mesmerized by external beauty in a way that prompts forgetfulness of their creator. For him, it is far too easy for persons to get lost in a perception of the world as an immanent order that can be understood in human terms (á la Hegel). When this happens, when God is pushed out of the picture (or collapsed into the picture), persons disregard their createdness and become fooled into overlooking the true nature of things. So, for example, when Kierkegaard considers the immediate beauty of a(n apparently) loving relationship, he writes, However beautiful a relationship of love has been between two people or among many, however complete all their desire and their bliss have been for themselves in mutual sacrifice and devotion, even though everyone has praised this relationship – if God and the relationship with God have been omitted, then this, in the Christian sense, has not been love but a mutually enchanting defraudation of love.45 At the beginning of this passage, Kierkegaard indicates that if God is not present in a relationship, a loving relationship can give off an appearance of beauty. Such beauty, however, can be hiding a fraudulence to that loving relationship – it can be disguising the ugliness of a godless and, therefore, loveless relationship.46 There is much more to be said about Kierkegaard’s understanding of the difference between a worldly aestheticism and a Christian aestheticism. Such elaboration, however, would take us beyond the scope of this chapter. However, there is one further concern that I want to mention, which does relate to our discussion. A pressing worry, for Kierkegaard, was the way in which Christianity was being confused with an external beauty that was not its own; it was being dressed up in dazzling clothes that were more immediately appealing to human sentiment.47 Whether Christianity was being painted in a positive light by focusing on the charm of church architecture, the dulcet tones of a choir, the lyricism of Christian poetry or by focusing on its connection with the grandeur of the natural world, he felt that such attention to external beauty was distracting persons from the struggles and sacrifices of the Christian life. ‘Christianity’ had ended up

43 44 45 46

47

JP 4:5033, p. 597 / SKS 26, NB32:62, p. 161. JP 4:5033, p. 597 / SKS 26, NB32:62, p. 161. WL, 107 / SKS 9, 111. For Kierkegaard, ‘Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person – God – a person, that is, that God is the middle term.’ WL, 107 / SKS 9, 111 (emphasis original). God is the ‘middle term’ (Mellembestemmelsen) in the true love-relationship because ‘the love is God’. WL, 121 / SKS 9, 123. Therefore, if God is not at the center of a relationship between two persons, then that relationship cannot be a truly loving relationship. See KJN 5, p. 327 / SKS 21, NB10:112a, p. 316; JP 1:544, p. 223 / SKS 25, NB28:53a, pp. 255–6; KJN 5, p. 327 / SKS 21, NB6:86, pp. 64–5.

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revolving around the enjoyment of a nominally ‘Christian’ culture and its products. It had ended up embracing a kind of theology from below, in which it was being distorted by the choice tastes of a particular culture – in which ‘loving God is loving the beautiful’.48 Such theology, for Kierkegaard, was turning Christianity into idolatry by attempting to elevate the creator with aesthetic values – by attempting to make God ‘beautiful’ according to secular standards of beauty. Dryly commenting on the culture of Danish Christendom, he writes, If I were a father or had to order someone to do something, and the one who was to obey was continually walking around chattering about how delightful and wonderfully delightful and how profoundly and matchlessly delightful [it was], then I’d say: ‘damn it, shut up and obey!’ Yet this is how some of the orthodox behave with God and [Christ] – always with this chatter about delightful and delightful; I think God and [Christ] must finally become tired of it and say: ‘Be [human] beings, period; obey, fear, love, and no more nonsense.’49 For Kierkegaard, one of the things that most distinguished Christianity from Hellenistic philosophies was that it ‘does not at all emphasize the idea of earthly beauty’.50 The concept that most definitively distinguishes [Christianity] from antiquity is that of the Good. The Greeks were unable to think about the Good without the Beautiful (the direction outward). In [Christianity] the essential expression of the Good is suffering (the direction inward; for suffering lies precisely in the outward direction being negated – the world’s sin).51 The idea that God would reveal himself in the midst of suffering (as well as in ‘the immediate form [of] beauty, power, glory, etc.’) was ‘foolishness to the Greeks’.52 But, for Kierkegaard, it is not only God who is made known in the midst of Christian suffering; beauty is also made known: ‘There is truly a community of suffering with God, a pact of tears, which is in itself so very beautiful.’53 Because the true beauty of creation corresponds to God’s will for creation, and because following God goes against the comfortable ways of the world, there is a beauty in the act of taking up one’s cross in obedience to God. However, even the martyr is not fully in touch with the theological beauty of creation. There is a limit to how much a human being can appreciate the extent and quality of creation’s beauty, even if she becomes completely aligned with the will of God. No human believers can ever capture this beauty for themselves. The beauty of creation is grounded in and defined by the ways and works of God who cannot be comprehended by systematic human thought; it is a beauty that transcends creaturely speculation and imagination. For this reason, Kierkegaard reflects, ‘I cannot really say that I positively enjoy nature [because] I do not quite realize what it is that I enjoy.’54 He continues,

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

JP 3:2455, p. 61 / SKS 22, NB11:127, pp. 76–7. KJN 4, p. 310 / SKS 20, NB4:49, pp. 309–10. JP 1:797, p. 368 / SKS 27, Papir 259, pp. 213–14. KJN 2, p. 276 / SKS 18, JJ:481, p. 299. BA, 162 / SKP VIII 2 B 9:15, 51. KJN 3, p. 230 / SKS 19, Notebook 8:35, p. 236. JP 1:117, p. 50 / SKS 27, Papir 96:1, p. 117.

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The works of the deity are too great for me; I always get lost in the details. This is the reason, too, why people’s exclamations on observing nature: It’s lovely, tremendous, etc. – are so frivolous. They are all too anthropomorphic; they come to a stop with the external; they are unable to express inwardness, depth.55 Kierkegaard did not think the real beauty of creation was something that could be grasped by even the most devout of Christians; it could only begin to be truly appreciated by faith, as a person comes to know the one who bestows beauty upon creation. Therefore, for him, the beauty of creation is to be respected with a wonderment and awe that sees this beauty as something that transcends the mastery of the creaturely imagination. As the Christian grows consciously in her relationship with God, she will recognize that there is always more to be discovered in the beauty of creation. And as her imagination begins to correspond to God’s aesthetic purposes, she can start to enjoy some of the many ways in which she has been created to play a unique role in creation.

IV. HUMAN UNIQUENESS Throughout his writings, Kierkegaard continually looks to non-human animals for inspiration: including sheep, camels, kangaroos, foxes, sparrows, eagles, storks, kingfishers, spiders, butterflies, frogs and jellyfish.56 To provide some examples of this: when reflecting on rhetorical technique in argument, he draws on the analogy of the shark that, when wanting to snatch its prey, turns on its dark-coloured back to reveal its silvery white underbelly in a way that confuses its prey.57 Or, when reflecting on the experience of watching persons fail to learn the language of an ‘eternal philosophy’, he writes, ‘it pained him; he thought the words to be so beautiful that he could not stop listening to them, just as one sadly gazes after the wild geese in the sky. Anyone who wants to belong to that world must join them, and yet no one has ever been seen flying with them.’58 One final example: when reflecting on how remarkable the stork is, Kierkegaard comments, ‘when the water is so low that it cannot drink, [the stork] throws in stones until the water is deep enough.’59 Numerous other examples could be listed to show his diverse musings on various facets of creation: on the seasons, the stars and the world’s geography. Doing so, however, would be a distraction. Suffice it to say, Kierkegaard was captivated by the natural world. It was continually on his mind and he was continually learning from it. When Kierkegaard draws on the non-human features of the world, he tends to do so because of the way they represent certain patterns in creation: patterns that human beings should either follow or avoid. On the one hand, he encourages his readers to learn from the goings on in creation. Drawing on Mt. 6.28, he thinks that human beings have much to learn from the way that the birds of the air and the lily in the field correspond to the will of God, without question. He admires the way that the rest of (the non-human) creation naturally corresponds to God’s will: as is evident in ‘the rising of the sun on the hour and setting on the hour, the shifting of the wind in a flash, the ebb and flow of the tide at specific times’.60 What is so beautiful about the rest of the natural world is that it

55 56 57 58 59 60

JP 1:117, p. 50 / SKS 27, Papir 96:1, p. 117. In the rest of this chapter, when referring to ‘animals’ I will be referring to non-human animals. JC, 122 / SKS 15, 20. JC, 148 / SKS 15, 40. JP 3:2848, p. 263 / SKS 20, NB3:12, p. 249. WA, 26 / SKS 11, 31.

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unquestioningly obeys the will of the creator. The natural world simply exists in the way that it was created to exist, according to the will of God, without vacillation (and without anxiety about vacillating).61 In this way, the natural world can teach human beings about ‘the unconditioned’. In obedience, the birds of the air and the lily in the field ‘are so simple or so sublime that they believe that everything that happens is unconditionally God’s will, and that they have nothing whatever to do in the world other than either to do God’s will in unconditional obedience or to submit to God’s will in unconditional obedience’.62 On the other hand, Kierkegaard does not think God created human beings to be defined by the same inevitability that defines the rest of the natural world. As I have mentioned, he believes that human beings have been created for, and are thus called to, an utterly unique way of life. God calls human beings to strive to resist their baser instincts in order to be obedient. They are called to struggle to be true to their created nature, and it is when they fail to do so that they act unnaturally. He did not believe that human beings should let their animal passions carry them away, like ‘a drunken peasant who lies in the wagon and sleeps and lets the horses shift for themselves’.63 Rather, they should grab hold of their lives and self-consciously take responsibility for their decisions and life-directions. In this respect, human beings were created to be more eminent than flora and fauna. For Kierkegaard, the key thing that distinguishes human beings from all other animals is a capacity for self-conscious individuality. They are created with an individuality that cannot be found anywhere else in creation. Now, to understand this particular emphasis, we need to turn to his account of what it means for a human being to exist as spirit. The person who exists as ‘spirit’, exists as a self ‘that relates itself to itself ’; she lives as a selfconscious self.64 With self-consciousness, she is able to reflect on herself (her actual self) in relation to the concept of another self. For example, she can reflect on whether she thinks she is a good self in relation to some concept of a bad self.65 By existing in this way, as spirit, a person distinguishes herself from the rest of kingdom animalia. The beast of the natural world, as Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis writes, ‘is a slave of blind instinct and acts blindly’.66 Animals are caught up within the inexorable processes of the natural world, and only ever act according to their natural instincts. There is no self-conscious way for individual animals to distinguish themselves from the other members of a species. As such, they are primarily defined by what kind of animal they are. So, for Kierkegaard, when it comes to ‘every animal species . . . [t]he type is higher; the specimen is lower’.67 Any individuality that an animal might attain will tend to be the result of a person bestowing a certain individuality upon them: for example, when a person names and trains a pet, or when a person points out something remarkable about an individual animal.

61

62 63 64 65

66 67

WA, 26–8 / SKS 11, 31–2. As Haufniensis notes, anxiety is one of the experiences that particularly distinguishes human beings from animals. See CA, 42 / SKS 4, 348. WA, 26–7 / SKS 11, 31 (Kierkegaard’s emphasis). CUP, 311–12 / SKS 7, 283. SUD, 13 / SKS 11, 129. Again, for Kierkegaard, a person does not simply stand before her own conception of self. Because she has been ‘established by another’, she also stands before that other’s conception of what it means to be a self. SUD, 13 / SKS 11, 129. CA, 68 / SKS 4, 372 JP 2:2071, p. 435 / SKS 26, NB31:149, p. 110.

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In light of contemporary studies of animal behaviour, especially on higher primates, there may be some debate about Kierkegaard’s assessment of non-human animals. Regardless of such debate, however, it seems fair to suggest that most human beings are distinguished by a capacity to make self-conscious choices to define themselves as particular individuals. For this reason, Kierkegaard writes, ‘in the human species . . . the individual is higher than the species’.68 Human beings are primarily identified by their individual names, and are known (and judged) by the particular lives that they choose for themselves. When it comes to human behaviour, Kierkegaard observes three kinds of (non-bestial) existence that human beings can create for themselves within the immanence of the natural world: aesthetic, ethical and immanent religiousness. Without going into detail, he understands that a person can naturally distinguish herself as an individual by selfconsciously devoting herself towards a single telos – such as beauty, culture, virtue, her own idea of a god. By so doing, she commits herself to a higher existence that is not impelled by baser instincts – as would be the case if she lived out a bestial existence. She may, for example, distinguish herself by becoming a musician, a scholar, a human rights activist or a Buddhist monk. However, when a person chooses to orient herself towards a single telos, which she imagines for herself, she does not transcend her world-historical existence. She simply chooses a relatively different kind of world-historical existence. Such relative attempts at self-definition do nothing more than actualize ‘a human creation’; they involve human beings creating themselves in their own images, as beings caught up in the patterns of the world-historical order.69 To become truly distinguished from the rest of creation, for Kierkegaard, a person must become oriented towards an end that (or who) transcends the world-historical order – an end that is beyond the immanence of creation. The only way for this to happen is by being transformed in and through a relationship with the transcendent reality of the eternal God.70 A person requires God to orient her to himself by interacting with her from beyond the boundaries of creation history. It is by being given to participate in a reciprocal relationship with God that a person becomes absolutely distinguished from the rest of creation – that she embraces her uniqueness as a single individual ‘created in the image of God’.71 For this reason, Kierkegaard insists that it is ‘only God’ who, in a creative active act, ‘can give individuality’.72 By being reconciled to God, a person becomes ‘different from ordinary men by a whole quality (in no animal species is there anything analogous to this, that one specimen is a whole quality different from others)’.73 With his emphasis on divine transcendence, Kierkegaard again critiques what he saw as a Hegelian commitment to the reduction of reality to the one world-historical system.74 To be clear, he did not think that right relationship with God involves an abstract relationship that somehow takes place outside history – in some kind of mystical, metaphysical realm. Rather, in and through the eternal-historical person of Jesus Christ, he understood 68 69 70 71 72

73 74

JP 2:2071, p. 435 / SKS 26, NB31:149, p. 110; see also KJN 7, p. 108 / SKS 23, NB16:21, pp. 107–8. JP 3:3225, p. 489 / SKS 26, NB34:36, p. 346. See JP 2:2008, pp. 403–4 / SKS 21, NB7:59, p. 105. KJN 7, p. 61 / SKS 23, NB15:91, p. 63. JP 3:3225, p. 489 / SKS 26, NB34:36, p. 346. Kierkegaard also adds in this journal entry: ‘if man is going to imitate God’s feat, it consists of taking away individuality.’ JP 2:2059, p. 430 / SKS 25, NB30:90, p. 458. See CA, 3 / SKS 4, 310.

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that God mediates himself to creation.75 ‘As a rule the relationship [to God] is present thus: it is Christ who leads us to God; man needs a mediator in order to come to God . . . [God] becomes my Father in the Mediator by means of the Spirit.’76 In and through Jesus Christ, the God-man, human persons can relate to God as historical beings and experience conversion to God within the natural history of the world. As I have already indicated, this conversion does not come easily. Proper (viz. created) human function is taken up in and through a process of struggle and suffering that will go against a person’s baser animal instincts.77 As such, for Kierkegaard, ‘to be animal is more comfortable’.78 By embracing a bestial existence, a person ‘is freed entirely from those strenuous efforts which certainly must appear to people nowadays to be fantastic madness – relating oneself personally to God, thinking that one is tested by God’.79 By living as a beast, a person can still relate himself to his own idea of ‘God’, but only has to worry about doing so ‘when he feels like it’.80 Also, he can find safety in numbers, without experiencing the isolation that comes with going against the grain of society. For Kierkegaard, to have to stand alone, abandoned, mocked, ridiculed, etc., is what animal-man fears most, most of all, because qua animal-creature he lives in fear of men. Therefore animal-man has the courage to do the most frightening things as long as he simply has human numbers with him, knows that others are doing the same thing or that the others think that he displays courage. Therefore this is the very collision Christ points to in particular: to suffer from men means Christianly precisely to fear God in contrast to fearing men, in contrast to what men as animal-creatures fear most of all – human numbers.81 If, however, a person seeks to live out a true relationship with God, if she follows Christ and lives according to the Spirit, she will find herself repudiated by the human race. For Kierkegaard, it is precisely in this isolation that persons ‘are helped through suffering to discover their distinctiveness’.82 Yet, he does not think that obedience to God requires a person to engage in an unrelenting struggle against her primal instincts in order to give her life to God. This is because, on the journey of a person’s relationship with God, a person’s primal instincts become transformed such that it becomes natural or basic for a person to obey God within this world.83 Under these circumstances, the ‘other will’ of the

75 76

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78 79 80 81

82 83

See JP 2:1424, p. 132 / SKS 24, NB24:13, p. 327. JP 2:1432, pp. 137–9 / SKS 25, NB27:23, pp. 140–1. Kierkegaard also affirms in this journal entry that the God-relationship begins with the Father who draws human beings to himself. He writes, ‘it is not the Spirit who leads to the Son and the Son who leads to the Father; no, it is the Father who directs to the Son, the Son who directs to the Spirit, and not until then is it the Spirit who leads to the Son and the Son who leads to the Father.’ For example, Kierkegaard writes, ‘To make health the highest good is an animalistic principle; this is the way an animal is regarded – if it is not in good health, it is not worth anything.’ JP 1:913, p. 405 / SKP V B 148:38. JP 2:2071, p. 435 / SKS 26, NB31:149, p. 110. JP 2:2071, p. 435 / SKS 26, NB31:149, p. 110. KJN 5, p. 112 / SKS 21, NB7:65, p. 108. JP 2:1940, p. 375 / SKS 27, Papir 586, p. 687. While Kierkegaard understands that reconciliation with God will deliver a person from her conformity to her animal instincts, it is worth clarifying that he did not think that sin is natural to the human species – comparable to the way in which web-feet are an innate part of ‘a species of water birds’. JP 1:51, p. 21 / SKP V B 53:15. JP 2:2059, p. 430 / SKS 25, NB30:90, p. 458. It is worth noting here that, for Kierkegaard, it is only as a result of the Fall that ‘sensuousness becomes sinfulness’. When this happens, ‘what it becomes is not what it first was.’ CA, 58–9 / SKS 3, 363.

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human comes to correspond to God’s will such that his obedience to God is ‘free from care, is never indecisive – he has faith; never vacillating – he is eternally resolved; never disconsolate – he is always joyous, always giving thanks’.84 In this way, a person finds his life in alignment with the will of God, just like the birds of the air and the lily of the field.

V. KIERKEGAARD’S CRITIQUE OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES From the discussion so far, it should be clear that Kierkegaard thought there was much more to reality than meets the empirical eye. This point, however, was not always taken as seriously as it should be by Christian scholars in the modern scientific age. This meant that Kierkegaard had a bittersweet appreciation for the natural sciences. On the one hand, he had no objection with the natural sciences as a descriptive study of the history, structure and behaviour of the natural world. Indeed, he had a deep admiration for the sciences, which is evident from his fascination with the natural world.85 He writes, There are probably few branches of knowledge which bestow on man the serene and happy frame of mind as do the natural sciences. He goes out into nature and everything is familiar to him; it is as if he had talked previously with the plants and animals. He not only sees what use man can make of them (this is something quite subordinate), but he sees their significance in the whole universe. He stands like Adam of old – all the animals come to him, and he gives them names.86 On the other hand, this admiration was marred by a concern for the way in which the veneration of the sciences had led to an overemphasis on an objective understanding of reality. For him, this development had led scholarship in Europe to devote itself to naturalistic patterns of thought that conflicted with the discernment of the natural world as creation – patterns that follow a trajectory that ‘will finally end with physics replacing moral reflection’.87 Again, as we have seen, Kierkegaard believed that the world is not simply created with physical and natural laws, which can be observed objectively. It is also created with a moral reality and purpose that needs to be apprehended subjectively, in and through a life of faith. As such, he believed that empirical science could only go so far in its reading of both the world and the place of human beings within it. To know created reality in its fullness requires the guidance of the creator. It requires God’s special revelation, which communicates to persons not only by way of objective facts and propositions but also by transforming them from within. Not only does it require the discernment of the mind but also the attentiveness of the heart. As Kierkegaard saw it, scholarship in Europe was on a trajectory towards a ‘pantheistic scientism’.88 That is, the directly observable world was being treated as God. In practice, science was displacing religion. And, due to ‘a lack of religious discipline, a lack of “sobriety” ’, even Christian scholars were praising ‘ “science, science” ’.89 This trajectory was symptomatic of a theological confusion about the place of human beings before

84 85 86 87 88 89

CD, 85 / SKS 10, 96. See WL, 282–3 / SKS 9, 280. JP 3:2806, p. 239 / SKS 27, Papir 32, p. 85. KJN 2, p. 260 / SKS 18, JJ:425, p. 281. KJN 7, p. 71 / SKS 23, NB15:103, p. 72. KJN 7, p. 71 / SKS 23, NB15:103, p. 72.

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God. It bespoke a yearning for cognitive mastery that was only appropriate to the creator. Scholars were labouring under the illusion that they could step back from the world of existence, in which they participate subjectively, and understand the world sub specie aeterni, from the aspect of eternity. Scientific scholarship had been placed on a pedestal that was overshadowing existential and faithful understandings.90 And this led to the benumbing of the intellectual world. This prompted Kierkegaard to make what was a rather curious move for him: he expressed admiration for a youthful understanding. It is well known that he had little time for infant baptism and felt that a certain level of cognitive maturity should be expected before a person openly commits to becoming a Christian in confirmation – because a child is not yet ready to take on such a decisive task.91 Yet, when it comes to knowing creation, he had a much higher regard for youthfulness. Youth understands that God has created the world, and yet that was six thousand years ago. But youth understands it immediately – no wonder, for to the young, what are six-thousand years but yesterday. When one grows older, six thousand years are a great many years; then one perceives that it was six thousand years ago that the world was created and also six thousand years since everything was very good.92 Kierkegaard’s appreciation for youthfulness here is comparable to his appreciation of the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. He has a high regard for the readiness of youth to relate to creation as God’s creation in a more immediate way. The problem with the kind of learning that was going on in Hegelian Denmark was that it encouraged a forgetfulness of createdness. It attended to creation as an immanent order that could be understood in its own terms, apart from the uncertainty of faith. As it did so, it established unfaithful habits of thought. What was happening was that the nature of reality was being reduced to those phenomena that could be directly observed, leading to a neglect of both the transcendent creator and the unobservable dynamics of creation. So, for example, Kierkegaard was deeply concerned about the way that the question of ‘what ought to be the case’ was being reduced to (or neglected in favour of) the question of ‘what is the case’ – what is now referred to as the naturalistic fallacy.93 He was also concerned about the way that scientists were minimizing those aspects of humanity that they could not directly explain – such as ‘how consciousness comes into being, or how consciousness of the surrounding world becomes self-consciousness, becomes God-consciousness’.94 Instead, scientists were preoccupied with explaining human beings in terms of ‘the nervous system and the system of ganglia and the circulation of blood’.95 Now it seems fair enough for natural scientists to be doing this and, at times, Kierkegaard clearly goes too far in his criticism of scientists for doing what one would expect them to be doing. But what was problematic was the concurrent emergence of naturalistic and

90 91

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93 94 95

KJN 7, p. 71 / SKS 23, NB15:103, p. 72. See JP 3:3101, p. 416 / SKS 26, NB33:8, pp. 250–1. Kierkegaard proposes that ‘confirmation must be postponed to the 25th year’. KJN 5, p. 189 / SKS 21, NB8:86, p. 181. EUD, 243–4 / SKS 5, 242. It is worth noting that Kierkegaard’s comments in this passage about the age of creation are simply a product of his time. There is no theological freight to these remarks, so they should not be read as a sign of support for the contemporary movement of young-earth creationism. See KJN 4, pp. 57–61 / SKS 20, NB:70, pp. 58–62. KJN 4, p. 59 / SKS 20, NB:70, p. 60; see also KJN 4, pp. 62–3 / SKS 20, NB:73, pp. 63–4. KJN 4, p. 60 / SKS 20, NB:70, p. 61.

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scientistic tendencies, which not only arose in the sciences but were also creeping into ethics and theology. For example, he was incensed by the way that biblical scholarship had begun to favour a scientific-historical hermeneutic that conflicted with a theological hermeneutic – with a reading of Scripture as revelation.96 What made this worse was that theologians were bending to the will of the sciences because of their embarrassment at the uncertainty of faith.97 Under these circumstances, Kierkegaard believed that theology required the bold confidence to be itself, to stand firm as a witness to the proper object of theological reason: the transcendent creator. Accordingly, Christians – whose faith in God should lead their whole worldview to be theological – were called to interpret reality with a humility that was sensitive to the boundaries of creaturely intellect. It is only in this way that creation can be known as creation.98

CONCLUSION Kierkegaard devoted very little direct attention to the doctrine of creation. However, his entire way of thinking was grounded in a reflective awareness of the created nature of things. He was clear that the natural order was not self-creating but was created by God to be the object of his love. But not only this; creation was established to be an object that would return this love by living out its created purpose. Such a response came naturally to most of God’s creation. But God gave human beings more choice. And, in despair, they continually made the wrong choices, causing them to fall into patterns of existence that went against the grain of their createdness. With an improper self-confidence and curiosity, human beings became caught up in intellectual games in which they pretended to be creators of the world. They came to doubt that there was anything more to reality than that which is immediately in front of them. They questioned the existence of an objective purpose and moral order, and they pioneered to create their own identities. In the face of this downward spiral, Kierkegaard uttered a call to repentance. He called society to turn back to God, to stop running away from the creator. He called them to recognize that they live and move and have their being as children of God, so that they might seek to reciprocate the love with and for which they have been created. As he did so, he spoke to them of the loving creator, of God’s creative activity, and of their createdness. Indeed, to conclude, so much of his theological vision is aptly captured by his words (to requote): ‘Recall that you are created in [God’s] image and according to his likeness, and this is the highest and the most glorious thing that can be said.’99

FURTHER READING Bellinger, Charles K. The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. De Nys, Martin J. ‘Aquinas and Kierkegaard on the Relation between God and Creatures’. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 75 (2001): 389–407.

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See KJN 4, pp. 62–6 / SKS 20, NB:73, pp. 63–7. JP 3:2823, pp. 252–4 / SKS 25, NB27:72, pp. 185–8. For further discussion of Kierkegaard’s relationship to the natural sciences, I would highly recommend M. G. Piety ’s discussion of this theme in her superb book Ways of Knowing: Kierkegaard’s Pluralist Epistemology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010), 80–7. KJN 1, pp. 267–8 / SKS 17, DD:198a, p. 2.

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Thompson, Curtis L. ‘Creation’. In Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Tome II: Classicism to Enthusiasm, edited by Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, 93–9. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15: tome II. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014. Zook, Darren C. ‘Kierkegaard’s Zoo: Humanity, Nature, and the Moral Status of Animals’. History of Philosophy Quarterly 23, no. 3 (July 2006): 263–76.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Theological Anthropology: Spirit as the Self ‘Before’ and ‘Resting in’ God SIMON D. PODMORE

INTRODUCTION: TO BE HUMAN IS TO NEED GOD Writing in 1844, Kierkegaard entitles the first of his Four Upbuilding Discourses: ‘To Need God Is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection’.1 To be human is not merely to long for, but, as Kierkegaard here insists, to be in need of God. Such ‘need’ is not solely a wound of unconsummated longing in human existence, but rather the ‘highest perfection’ of what it means to be human. The ‘need for God’ therefore grounds humanity in a deep sense of absence, while at the same time drawing a human being towards its ‘perfection’, its telos, as realized in the horizon of ‘resting [grunder] transparently in God’.2 This need is, therefore, axiomatic for the beginning and end of human ontology, and, as such, orients both the introduction and conclusion of this chapter. The ‘need for God’ is both the ground and horizon of this account of Kierkegaard’s vision of what it means to be a human being. Conspicuously, such a vision of radical need arises in profound contrast to our own prevailing cultural expressions of the human condition. ‘Need’ emphatically sustains normative imagery of what it means to be human in contemporary Western culture. But such ‘need’ is cultivated ruthlessly by consumerist cultures that inform us that our deepest human needs can be fulfilled by the endless acquisition of ‘goods’ that, while promising to fulfil, merely serve to excite our desires for what comes next. ‘Need’ compels contemporary humanity to accede to our prescribed identity as ‘consumers’ whose desires are endlessly restless in their longing for novelty: the latest, the newest, the finest of products, that promise – but never deliver – final satisfaction of our human needs. The inevitable lack of fulfilment such ‘goods’ actually offer (whether material, intellectual or spiritual) may yet give rise to the sort of ‘despair’ over the human condition that Kierkegaard understands as a potential path to the awakening of ‘Spirit’. But such consciousness is quickly suppressed by the spectacle of the ‘latest product’ – the latest panacea for our human needs. The nascent narrative of disillusionment that our consumerist cultures constantly disrupt is, for Kierkegaard, a vital stage on the journey towards ‘becoming a self ’, which is itself inextricable from what it means to be a human being – this particular 1 2

EUD, 297. SUD, 82.

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human being. Both becoming a self and being human are predicated upon the recognition that God is the ‘highest Good’ and therefore the deepest need of our existence. ‘A human being is spirit’, according to the affirmation presented early in The Sickness unto Death – the most vital reference point for the exploration of theological anthropology offered here. Yet what, in relation to a human being, is ‘Spirit’ (Ånd)? The answer is deceptive in its ostensible simplicity. ‘Spirit is the Self. But what is ‘the Self ’?3 Turning back for a moment, to the first of Kierkegaard’s Four Upbuilding Discourses from 1844, the idea of ‘the self ’ is understood to represent the self-knowledge of a human being, particularly one who recognizes that one’s ultimate need for God is the ‘difficult’ way through which God brings a human being to view oneself ‘according to [one’s] perfection’.4 Existing human beings, however, are liable to assume delusional constructs of self-knowledge as ‘the self ’. In other words, for Kierkegaard, the enigma of selfhood is a hermeneutic circle of ‘despair’ in which the self is both lost and found in its relation to God. It is, for Kierkegaard’s authorship, through the modern lens of ‘selfhood’ that a contemporary human being comes to know what one is. This lens, however, is fragmented and shattered, to the point of dissolution, until the human being comes to accept the need to relate to oneself via the ‘highest perfection’ of one’s need for God. Only then can a human being become oneself as ‘Spirit’, since, as The Sickness unto Death declares, ‘not to be conscious of oneself as spirit – is despair, which is spiritlessness’.5 While alternative angles remain open, in this chapter I affirm Kierkegaard’s concern with the problem of ‘the self ’ as a hermeneutic key to understanding what it means to be ‘a human being’. In other words, this is a reflection on what it means to understand oneself as a human being in relation, more so than an anatomy of what a human being is in itself. This perspective is not, however, intended to assert that a rarefied and privileged axiom of gnōthi seauton (‘know thyself!’) constitutes the apotheosis of all that a human being is. Rather, it is to locate the consciousness of what it means to be human within the hermeneutic of selfhood: specifically, the self as Spirit (Ånd), the restless self, becoming itself ‘before God’, in ‘the mirror of the Word’, across an ‘infinite qualitative abyss [Afgrund]’, beyond which it longs to realize itself as free from ‘despair’ (Fortvivlelse), and ‘resting [grunder] transparently [gjennemsigtigt: see-through] in God’.6 Ultimately, such a vision involves the human being in a relation to itself in all its actuality and specificity: as body, soul, Spirit, heart and mind, realizing itself in ‘inverse resemblance’ to ‘the image of God’.7 This vision, worked out within a modern phenomenology of the human condition in its anxiety (Angest), melancholy (Melancholi/Tungsind), despair (Fortvivlelse), temptation (Fristelse), ordeal (Prøvelse) and spiritual trial (Anfægtelse), represents the consummately theological distinctiveness of the anthropological thought woven throughout Kierkegaard’s writings. Although Kierkegaard’s extensive corpus is not formulated according to an unequivocal systematic structure, there are key themes which resonate profoundly throughout the authorship, shaping its overall focus. These characteristic themes, even concepts, generate a constellation of deep existential and theological concerns around which the voices of Kierkegaard’s polyphonic authorship orbits. Perhaps the most prominent among these are notions of central concern to theological anthropology, notions which provide an

3 4 5 6 7

SUD, 13. EUD, 312. SUD, 44. SUD, 82. UDVS, 193.

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anatomy of the human condition in its restless relationship to God and to the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ which estranges the self from its true ground and rest. Ultimately, there is an eschatological horizon to Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology against which this struggle of the self to become itself ‘before God’ is envisioned as a kenotic task of ‘becoming nothing’, such that ‘the self directly before God’ (‘the theological self ’8) is realized as a self ‘resting transparently in God’.9 To this end, Kierkegaard also invokes the ‘self directly before Christ’10 to whom the call is given: ‘come unto me all who are weary for here is rest’. In Christ is rest for the restless, a grounding [grunder] for those who find themselves out over the 70,000 fathoms of an ‘infinite qualitative abyss [Afgrund]’11 between self and God. In this light, I suggest that key concerns in theological anthropology constitute the definitive concerns for Kierkegaard’s authorship, namely: sin and forgiveness; justification and sanctification; the constitution of the soul; the hermeneutics of selfhood; the relation to the other and the Otherness of God; freedom; anxiety; melancholy; despair; spiritual trial and temptation, among other related notions. While Kierkegaard does not write in the genre of a systematic theologian, it is possible to develop significant constructive theology from the key constellation points he outlines. In this sense, many modern theologians and philosophers have based important anthropological structures in Kierkegaardian concerns for the human condition, particularly the condition of ‘anxiety’ (Angest). However, while the Angst of post/modern Western subjectivity resonates with ‘secular’ existential and anthropocentric modes, the even darker theological territory of Kierkegaardian ‘despair’ (Fortvivlelse) provides a more explicitly Theo-/Christocentric challenge to personal self-understanding which fewer thinkers have been willing to engage. Perhaps the most unsettling affront to human introspection subsists in the AntiClimacean diagnosis that despair is present in ‘Universality’ (Almindelighed)12 and, as an expression of sin (whether conscious or unconscious), is ultimately irresolvable without God. The faith, particularly faith in the possibility of salvation, which therefore transpires as the antidote to despair in Kierkegaard’s writings, is more rarely assumed by those thinkers inspired by Kierkegaard who may feel more at ease among the literary vignettes of melancholy, anxiety and Romantic despair which characterize a life that does not affirm itself as lived before God. As such, many interpreters are, understandably, seduced by Kierkegaardian tropes of estrangement, while less affirming of the necessity of faith – let alone the ‘spiritual trial’ (Anfægtelse) that Kierkegaard affirms as an authenticator of the life of ‘Spirit’ (Ånd). One may need reminding here of Anti-Climacus’s axiom: ‘the greater the conception of God, the more self . . . the greater the conception of Christ, the more self ’.13 A comprehensive account of the theme of theological anthropology in Kierkegaard’s authorship and its legacy far exceeds the parameters of this chapter. In light of such limitations, and as an exploration in explicitly theological anthropology, this chapter will orient its focus upon elements often neglected or sublimated by Kierkegaardian 8 9 10 11 12

13

SUD, 79. SUD, 82. SUD, 113. CUP, 459. SUD, 22–8. Almindelighed can also be translated as ‘generality’. Nonetheless, Anti-Climacus clearly asserts that ‘no human being ever lived’ who has not ‘despaired’. SUD, 22. SUD, 113–14.

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philosophical anthropologies. As such, while acknowledging Kierkegaard’s core definition of the human being as a ‘dialectical synthesis’ of body and soul sublated via Spirit, this chapter will also identify the significance of more biblical (arguably more Hebraic than Greek) notions of ‘heart’ as something which thinks and wills as well as feels. Kierkegaardian theological anthropology is thereby directed towards key philosophicaltheological-psychological pseudonymous texts such as The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, while also attending to the more devotional, even perhaps mystical, accounts of the human being in Kierkegaard’s eponymous ‘upbuilding’ (Opbyggelige) and ‘Christian’ ‘discourses’ (Taler), along with his notebooks and papers. For one thing, it will be indicated how Kierkegaard’s discourses reflect more subtle and nuanced aspects of the human being in relation to ‘the religious’, both developing and even ostensibly challenging the dialectical anthropological structure worked out in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings. Here, one sees Kierkegaard working lyrically as well as devotionally with the defining motif of the Imago Dei, stirring readers/listeners to reflect upon what it means to reflect the image of God across an abyss of ‘infinite qualitative difference’.14

I. KNOW THYSELF?: THE HUMAN CONDITION AND THE PROBLEM OF THE MODERN SELF In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard says this about ‘having a self ’: ‘[T]o have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession, an infinite concession, given to man, but it is also eternity’s claim upon him.’15 The divine commission of ‘becoming oneself ’, as Kierkegaard here elicits, functions as both gift and obligation for a human being. As gift, it delivers humanity into temporality; as obligation, it renders ‘self-becoming’ accountable to eternity – thereby comprising a consummate horizon for human existence. In light of such extensive possibility, Kierkegaard’s portraits of the human condition bring together a vast historical and conceptual range of theological, philosophical and psychological perspectives. The tapestry of Kierkegaard’s authorship results from an intricate weaving of sources that are both beautifully synthesized and yet incommensurate. As such, there are profound tensions in his works, not least between certain biblical readings of what it means to be a human being and a tradition of intentionally modern self-reflection. Although Kierkegaard seeks a retrieval of earlier Christian thought, of medieval mystics, reformers and Pietists, he revives these voices within a self-consciously modern horizon of introspection. In other words, even when Kierkegaard seeks to rehabilitate the insights of the ‘older and better devotional literature’,16 his reading of such literature establishes a hermeneutic circle which cannot escape the contemporary question of what it means to be a person within the arc of modernity. More pointedly, Kierkegaard’s reading of historical Christian sources invokes the ultimately soteriological question of ‘contemporaneity’, of what it means to be a Christian in the ‘twilight of Christendom’.17 Kierkegaard’s entanglement with modernity is especially prominent through the tension it generates within his theological anthropology. The modern ‘epoch of selfhood’18

14 15 16 17

18

SUD, 126. SUD, 21. JP 4:4384, p. 272 / SKS 26, NB33:54, p. 301. Re. Stephen Crites, In the Twilight of Christendom: Hegel vs. Kierkegaard on Faith and History (Chambersburg, PA: American Academy of Religion, 1972). Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 35.

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is diagnosed by Kierkegaard as essentially narcissistic and degenerate; and yet the idiom of ‘the self ’ and the solitude of interiority is assumed as an almost axiomatic problem for his authorship which can only be resolved through a theocentric affirmation of selfhood. The question then becomes: what does it mean to become ‘a self ’ within the horizon of the dissolution of selfhood? Or, in more explicitly Kierkegaardian terms, what does it mean to become ‘a self ’ when ‘to will to be oneself ’ is a form of ‘despair’? After all, ‘[t]here is only One who knows what He Himself is, that is God; and He knows also what every man in himself is, for it is precisely by being before God that every man is.’19 In engaging such questions, Kierkegaard locates himself as a consciously modern thinker, contaminated by a spirit of Romantic melancholy particular to modernity’s sense of loss. This lament of sacred meaning haunts Kierkegaard’s authorship, even when he appeals to the premodern, or even anticipates the postmodern. There remains an irrepressible nostalgia for an idealized Christianity which at the same time acknowledges the irreversibility of the contemporary zeitgeist. He imagines what it might be like if God appeared today;20 or if Luther himself returned to behold the Lutheran Church.21 The results are an indictment of the present age, but this judgement subsists with a confession that Pandora’s box cannot be un-opened. Yet, emerging from this modern, if tragic, Promethean spirit of Enlightenment is also an honesty which speaks truth to the power of Christendom. Even atheists, especially Ludwig Feuerbach, expose the elision of ‘self ’ with ‘God’ which distinguishes the despair of modern Christianity.22 It is in the idiom of modernity (even in mimicry of the abstract lexicon of Hegel), that Kierkegaard asks us once again, insisting, ‘what is the self?’23 It is, after all, modernity which finally realizes the depth of the Delphic-Socratic injunction to ‘Know thyself!’.24 But modernity also halts at the abyss, not daring to look down into its true depths. To ‘Know thyself ’ is ‘provisional’, comes Kierkegaard’s admonishment. According to Christianity, ‘know yourself–and look at yourself in the mirror of the Word in order to know yourself properly.’ There is, in other words, a further movement of reflection beyond the despairing self-regard of modern knowing. ‘No true self-knowledge without God-knowledge or before God,’ Kierkegaard pronounces. ‘To stand before the mirror means to stand before God.’25. With the motif of ‘the self before God’ Kierkegaard constructs an anxious synthesis of modern interiority which interacts with a theological hermeneutic of existence as lived out coram Deo. This latter dimension, as expressed most intensely in Augustine and Luther, evokes a sense of fear and trembling that has been forsaken by the apparent selfapotheosis of modern subjectivity. As such, the Kierkegaardian ‘self before God’ demands a radical rupture of interiority – whether the implosion of the Cartesian cogito or the ‘inclosing despair’ [Indesluttethed] of the ‘spiritless’ [Åndløsheden] and ‘the demonic’. This rupture empties and opens the self out in relation to an Other (a kenosis-in-ekstasis), such that the self is exposed to itself in ‘the mirror of the Word’. Such an ostensibly negative movement requires a moment of difficult self-recognition, ‘a transition to the

19 20 21 22 23 24

25

CD, 43. See further CUP. See further FSE, 16–19. JP 6:6523, pp. 243–4 / SKS 22, NB13:92, p. 336. SUD, 13. CI, 203. Gnôthi Seauton (‘Know thyself ’) was also a provisional title for Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. JP 4:3902, p. 40 / SKS 24, NB24:159, p. 425.

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subjective’ epitomized by David’s moment of realization before the revelatory word of the prophet Nathan: ‘thou art the man’ (2 Sam. 12.7).26 Difficult words to hear under many circumstances. Given Kierkegaard’s strategy of dissembling ideas through vignettes, portraits, pseudonymous characters and narratives, it is significant that David’s moment of subjectivity, his consciousness of sin, is provoked through Nathan’s use of a parable as a mirror in which the wayward king might recognize and convict himself. In this light, it is tempting to claim that the main theological objective of Kierkegaard’s authorship is to offer such mirrors in which the reader/listener might recognize him- or herself. But Kierkegaard does not consider himself a prophet and, as one who is avowedly ‘without authority’,27 frequently claims to abdicate all right to judge. He does not, as Nathan does by announcing ‘Thou art the man’, speak truth to power, at least not directly. Despite such refrain, Kierkegaard does, via the ‘higher’ Christian pseudonym of AntiClimacus, offer a normative definition of the teleology of selfhood: The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.28 It will be asked later exactly when it may be that ‘despair’, or sin, ‘is completely rooted out’. But first it is enquired as to what precisely is this ‘power’? Ultimately, in a theological teleology, the establishing power is God. But if attention is withdrawn from the telos to the archē of the self, it can be seen that this is a God whose very power has established the self in a radical and inexorable freedom – a freedom which can constitute the self;29 but a freedom which also makes despair a living, and dying, possibility.

II. CREATED FREEDOM: ‘THE MOST FRAGILE OF ALL THINGS’ In a journal entry from 1838, Kierkegaard writes, ‘[T]hat God could create human beings free over against himself is the cross which philosophy could not bear but upon which it has remained hanging.’30 The idea of God creating humanity with the freedom to reject God not only introduces the possibility of ‘offence’ but also offers a radical model of power in relation to freedom that ‘crucifies philosophy’ (as Kierkegaard suggests above). In one of the most theologically dynamic passages in his entire authorship, Kierkegaard proposes a deceptively simple resolution to ‘The whole question of the relation of God’s omnipotence and goodness to evil’. Kierkegaard assumes that ‘The greatest good . . . which can be done for a being . . . is to make it free.’ However, ‘In order to do just that, omnipotence is required.’ Omnipotence, Kierkegaard reflects, is ordinarily supposed to be an extension of the form of power that makes others dependent. Divine omnipotence, however, demonstrates its power through being able to make another being wholly independent of itself: omnipotence, in the divine sense, sets the other free. Omnipotence, therefore, ‘must contain the unique qualification of being able to withdraw itself again in 26 27 28 29 30

FSE, 63. FSE, 17. SUD, 14. ‘[T]he self is freedom.’ SUD, 13, 29. JP 2:1237, p. 58 / SKS 18, FF:149, p. 103.

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a manifestation of omnipotence in such a way that precisely for this reason that which has been originated through omnipotence can be independent.’31 Kierkegaard here presents a vision of a creative divine omnipotence that overcomes human constructs of power that assert themselves through the negation and enslavement of the other – as articulated, for example, in Hegel’s account of the relation between Master and Slave (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft – or ‘Lordship and Bondage’32). Human beings, it is suggested, typically negotiate intersubjectivity through an economy of captivity rather than freedom. As such, ‘one human being cannot make another person wholly free, because the one who has power is himself captive in having it and therefore continually has a wrong relationship to the one whom he wants to make free’.33 In other words, even the power to make another free is a form of captivity: such power over the freedom of the other holds the self in its thrall. Even in granting freedom to the other, the self retains a sense of power over the other, and it is by this sense of power itself that the self is held captive. It might be said, therefore, that between human beings, there is no such thing as a free gift, given without obligation to the one who gives. Human power is therefore inevitably captive to its own sense of finitude. It is only really ‘power’ relative to the disempowerment or empowerment of the other. It is power in a sense of anxiety over power itself, and, as such, it is never free but always captive to the notion of power itself. Divine power, by contrast, expresses itself as the infinite power of a creator through a paradoxical and kenotic relationship to the creaturely other: Only omnipotence can withdraw itself at the same time it gives itself away, and this relationship is the very independence of the receiver. God’s omnipotence is therefore his goodness. For goodness is to give away completely, but in such a way that by omnipotently taking oneself back one makes the recipient independent. All finite power makes [a being] dependent; only omnipotence can make [a being] independent, can form from nothing [creation ex nihilo] something that has its continuity in itself through the continuous withdrawing of omnipotence. Omnipotence is not ensconced in a relationship to another, for there is no other to which it is comparable – no, it can give without giving up the least of its power, i.e., it can make [a being] independent.34 In God, the identity of omnipotence and goodness is expressed through the creation of something other than God ‘from nothing’: that is, a human being who does not exist in contingency with another substance – rather, that which is created ex nihilo is ‘let go’. Such a radical freedom, Kierkegaard continues, is unthinkable from the vantage point of human beings – the irony being that creatures created in inexorable freedom habitually subject one another to relationships of enslavement: It is incomprehensible that omnipotence is able not only to create the most impressive of all things – the whole visible world – but is able to create the most fragile of all things – a being independent of that very omnipotence. Omnipotence, which can handle the world so toughly and with such a heavy hand, can also make itself so light that what it has brought into existence receives independence. Only a wretched and

31 32

33 34

JP 2:1251, p. 62 / SKS 20, NB:69, p. 58. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), B, IV, 187, 113–14. JP 2:1251, p. 62 / SKS 20, NB:69, p. 58. JP 2:1251, p. 62 / SKS 20, NB:69, p. 58.

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mundane conception of the dialectic of power holds that it is greater and greater in proportion to its ability to compel and to make dependent.35 It is God’s omnipotence, goodness and ultimately love which give independence to ‘the most fragile of all things’, such that one who is created from nothing can become something, even a despairing something against God. Kierkegaard returns to this idea in his Christian Discourses: It is said that God’s omnipotence crushes a human being. But it is not so; no man is so much that God needs omnipotence to crush him, because for omnipotence he is nothing. It is God’s love that even in the last moment manifests his love by making him to be something for it.36 While one may fear being crushed by the power of God, such fear is a projection of human standards of power, pushed to the most ‘fantastic’ (Phantastiske) extreme. Divine omnipotence, however, does not overwhelm a human being because God’s love wills that one becomes oneself, as a self enabled to freely love God – or otherwise to despair – in response. This process of individuation is elaborated by Kierkegaard in terms of becoming a self, or becoming Spirit. ‘To be spirit is to be I. God desires to have I’s, for God desires to be loved.’37

III. FALLING INTO UNFREEDOM: ANXIETY AND DESPAIR Although God wishes to be loved, the gift of freedom necessitates the possibility of refusing the love of God. In other words, freedom postulates the possibility of sin (despair) itself. This possibility is expressed through Kierkegaard’s dialectic of ‘anxiety’ (Angest): a relation which is always ‘sympathetic and antipathetic’ in its fascination and revulsion towards that which is both feared and desired.38 As elaborated in The Concept of Anxiety, Vigilius Haufniensis considers that each individual is responsible for his or her own fall into sin, though each inherits the primal condition of anxiety: the dizziness which ensues from one’s consciousness of freedom’s innumerable possibilities. Guilt is assumed, rather than inherited, by each individual in his or her own freedom since ‘whoever yields to temptation is himself guilty of the temptation’.39 Anxiety is symptomatic of the human being’s dialectical constitution as body and soul, ‘the psychical and the physical’, in ‘synthesis’ with ‘spirit [Ånd]’40 – which lies dreaming within, though awakened, in the anxiety of freedom.41 This constitution is reaffirmed in The Sickness unto Death where in announcing that ‘Spirit is the self ’, Anti-Climacus wonders: But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation. The self is not the relation [the synthesis] but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.42

35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

JP 2:1251, pp. 62–3 / SKS 20, NB:69, p. 58. CD, 128. JP 4:4350, p. 248 / SKS 26, NB31:151, p. 111. CA, 103. CA, 109. CA, 43. CA, 42. SUD, 13.

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In this development, the synthesis of soul and body is not sufficient for Spirit to be self: selfhood is established in the relation of itself to itself through the synthesis in which it becomes ‘the positive third, and this is the self ’.43 But this relation is only sustainable in reflective relation to an other, namely to the power which established the relation – that is, in relation to God.44 Anti-Climacus therefore rejects the notion that the self could be established within its own power. Such selves, as captive to power itself, inevitably collapse in on themselves. Even in seeking to establish oneself in one’s own freedom, one will inevitably fall into unfreedom, whether by oneself or by relation to the other. Furthermore, the existence of an establishing power (God) renders such autonomic selfhood as a form of despair: ‘If a human self had established itself, then there could be only one form: not to will to be oneself, but there could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself.’45 In other words, if the self were truly only accountable to itself then despair would only take the form of a failure to fulfil one’s own standards. To will to be oneself would, according to its own interior terms, constitute authentic selfhood. But Anti-Climacus regards such self-derived selfhood as a narcissistic delusion. In the presence of God such selfhood is agonistically exposed as a failure to relate oneself to one’s transparent ground. God’s existence therefore makes possible the second form of despair: ‘in despair to will to be oneself ’ which is specifically the expression for the complete dependence of the relation (of the self), the expression for the inability of the self to arrive at or to be in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only, in relating itself to itself, by relating itself to that which has established the entire relation.46 Kierkegaardian selfhood in this dialectic of rest and restlessness can be understood, therefore, as both ontological and hermeneutic. It is ontological insofar as selfhood is established, grounded (grunder) in God and exists in ontological relation to God, its creator, even if this relation remains one of despair. Selfhood is hermeneutic insofar as ‘the self ’ is a relation interpreted in relation to itself and to an other – relations according to which the self is reflected and reinterpreted, constantly within a state of becoming which demands, though continually exceeds, consummate self-understanding. The condition of selfhood, as the awakening of Spirit, is therefore one of inexorable restlessness: ‘Spirit is restlessness. Christianity is the most profound restlessness of existence – so it is in the New Testament.’47 Christendom, by contrast, is a soporific.48 This restlessness is exacerbated by the impasse which confronts the self in its attempt to relate the relation to itself: the ‘infinite qualitative abyss’ which estranges the self from God and the restless Spirit from its source of rest. The profound aporia for selfhood therefore emerges as a question of how to relate oneself to a God who is ‘absolutely different [absolut forskjelligt]’.49

43 44 45 46 47 48 49

SUD, 13. SUD, 13. SUD, 14. SUD, 14. JP 4:4361, p. 255 / SKS 27, Papir 546, p. 650. JP 4:4362, p. 255 / SKS 27, Papir 512, p. 630. PF, 45.

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IV. INTO THE ABYSS: THE INFINITE QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE HUMAN AND THE DIVINE This aporia is further deepened by the realization that, as Johannes Climacus observes, this ‘difference’ is established in sin, ‘since the difference, the absolute difference, must have been caused by the individual himself ’.50 The difference is, therefore, grounded in the will: whether in its egoistic, even demonic, self-will; or in its consummate failure to will anything at all. The difference is, as such, a difference of despair, affirmed by AntiClimacus as ‘the most chasmic qualitative abyss [Qualitetens meest svælgende Dyb]’51 between the self and God. This vital sense of human-divine alterity is averred throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship as an ‘absolute’ (absolut), ‘essential’ (væsentlig), ‘eternal’ (evig), ‘infinite’ (uendelig), ‘qualitative’ (qualitative) difference, attaining nigh on inexorable status within his thinking. Kierkegaard’s notebooks provide an almost axiomatic formulation of ‘the law of the relations between God and man in the God-relationship’, expressed via quasi-scientific categorization: DIVISIO There is an infinite, radical, qualitative difference between God and man. This means, or the expression for this is: the human person achieves absolutely nothing; it is God who gives everything; it is he who brings about a person’s faith, etc. This is grace, and this is Christianity’s major premise.52 However, Kierkegaard offers a vital ‘SUBDIVISIO’ which introduces a dialectical moderation of the potential excesses of such a theology of grace. ‘If the Divisio is everything, then God is so infinitely sublime [uendelig ophøiet] that there is no intrinsic or actual relationship between God and the individual human being.’53 In other words, if ‘infinite qualitative difference’ means that God is everything and the human being is absolutely nothing, then ‘grace’ itself may become a source of further alienation. One may be tempted by the ethical dispensations offered by Antinomianism; or else be tempted to despair (a tentatio desperationis) of the ‘infinite sublimity’ of God’s grace, in light of which the self appears as nothing but irremediably unworthy. The ‘fantastic [Phantastiske]’ excesses of the latter are viscerally expressed in an intimate vignette from The Sickness unto Death: To exist before God may seem unendurable to a man because he cannot come back to himself, become himself. Such a fantasized religious person would say (to characterize him by means of some lines): ‘That a sparrow can live is comprehensible; it does not know that it exists before God. But to know that one exists before God, and then not instantly go mad or sink into nothingness!’54 In this religious pathology, consciousness of existing before God, the ‘infinitely sublime’, demands a self-mortification that can never satiate its own sense of infinite nothingness. There is no sense of a self ‘relating’ to God other than through a ‘despair of ’ or ‘over the forgiveness of sins’.55 Forgiveness, as the gift of grace, is acceded to in its onerous and 50 51 52 53 54

55

PF, 47. SUD, 122. JP 2:1383, p. 113 / SKS 24, NB22:78, p. 144. JP 2:1383, p. 113 / SKS 24, NB22:78, p. 144. SUD, 32. Kierkegaard suggests in his journals that he himself is represented by ‘the religious poet’ in this passage. JP 6:6437, pp. 176–7 / SKS 22, NB11:217, pp. 133–4. SUD, 109–24.

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‘infinite sublimity’, rather than received as true free gift and as a gift of freedom for the self. The problem here, commensurate with the problem of power attended to above, is that the forgiveness of sins is interpreted via a human lens of captivity and freedom. According to such a hermeneutic of despair, forgiveness can elicit a reactive sense of ‘offence’ towards the claim to forgive sins, either because one refuses the designation of being a ‘sinner’ before God, or because one deems one’s sins to be ‘unforgiveable’. The latter response can descend into excessive self-mortification; or into a ‘demonic’ assertion and identification of oneself as a sinner (commensurate with Haufniensis’s category of ‘anxiety about the good’56). Such expressions of ‘offence’ constitute a self-incarceration in ‘inclosing reserve [Indesluttethed]’:57 a notion resonant with Augustinian and Lutheran imagery of the sinner as incurvatus in se (curved in on itself) and the insidious problem of the Eigenwille (own-will or self-will) in German mystical (Eckhartian) theology. The epistemic and consequently soteriological knot which needs to be untangled within the self requires a metanoia in one’s ‘consciousness of sin’ and ‘consciousness of the forgiveness of sins’. The self in the despair of such self-inclosure (Indesluttethed), even in ‘hidden inwardness’,58 must let go of the ‘self which in despair wills to be oneself ’ (the Eigenwille: self-will), which means letting go (releasing) one’s understanding, even to the point of a ‘crucifixion of one’s understanding’59 of what one thought one knew about God’s ‘possibility’ for forgiving sins. Here, the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ looms large, but this time the presence of absolute alterity between the human and the divine brings light as well as darkness. As stated above, ‘sin’ is a cause of the ‘absolute difference’; but, as shown above, so too is God’s creation of the human being ex nihilo a source of inexorable freedom and alterity. In theological idiom, the ‘infinite qualitative difference’, therefore, is initially a matter of ontology (the absolute difference between uncreated creator and created creature); but following the anxiety which is generated by freedom’s relation to ‘possibility’ and ‘temptation’, the difference also becomes a matter of hamartiology and even soteriology for the self before God. For the self ’s relation to the infinite qualitative difference of God to develop towards soteriology – and even, as discussed below, towards sanctification as well as salvation – the self in despair must overcome its own sense of despair of the ‘absolute difference’ by embracing the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ itself. In other words, the despairing self must return to the ground of freedom: the ontological meaning of absolute alterity which affirms a kind of apophatic hermeneutic towards the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ itself. Since God is in an important sense ‘Wholly Other’, or ‘absolutely different’, the self is actually incapable of discerning for itself what sin actually is and the extent of its alienation from the divine. To define one’s relation to the Wholly Other in terms of one’s own sense of sin is a fallacious form of despair since ‘what you know least of all’ is ‘how far from perfect you are and what sin is’.60 After all, it is only the eternal that can reveal the depths of one’s unknown despair to oneself, such that one has ‘to learn what sin is by a

56

57 58 59 60

CA, 118. Haufniensis identifies ‘the demonic’ as ‘the will of unfreedom’. CA, 143*. The ‘defiance’ of ‘demonic rage’ is further elaborated by Anti-Climacus as the unfreedom of ‘despair’ (SUD, 72), which, nonetheless, can indicate a rise in the self ’s consciousness from ‘spiritlessness’ to a dark awakening of ‘Spirit’. SUD, 116. Furthermore, insofar as ‘the devil is sheer spirit’ his ‘will to be oneself ’ is ‘the most intensive despair’. SUD, 42. CA, 123. PC, 214. JP 4:4375, p. 265 / SKS 22, NB11:176, p. 106. SUD, 96.

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revelation from God’.61 The consciousness of sin, therefore, enforces the absolute limit of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ such that one must say that Sin is the one and only predication about a human being that in no way, either via negationis [by denial] or via eminentiæ [by idealization], can be stated of God. To say of God (in the same sense as saying that he is not finite and consequently, via negationis, that he is infinite) that he is not a sinner is blasphemy.62 While sin separates the human being from God, God’s forgiveness of sin accomplishes an impossible possibility which exceeds, and even offends, human understanding, establishing a deeper soteriological and ontological sense of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’: As sinner, man is separated from God by the most chasmic qualitative abyss. In turn, of course, God is separated from man by the same chasmic qualitative abyss when he forgives sins. If by some kind of reverse adjustment the divine could be shifted over to the human, there is one way in which man could never in all eternity come to be like God: in forgiving sins.63 These two statements about sin and forgiveness in relation to the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ can be read as commensurate with Kierkegaard’s earlier ‘DIVISIO’/ ‘SUBDIVISIO’ of ‘the law of the relations between God and man in the God-relationship’. If consciousness of sin ‘is everything’,64 then God’s Wholly Otherness may be interpreted in no other way than via a hermeneutic of despair. Struggling against this vision is a different glimpse of God’s Wholly Otherness through a hermeneutic of faith: a faith in God’s forgiveness of that which the self in despair considers ‘impossible’.65 Through this dialectical revelation of the forgiveness of sins the revelation of one’s consciousness of sin is not obliterated, but rather is retained and transfigured. While this ‘transfiguration’ does not render sins as negligible (as in forms of ‘cheap grace’), it does enshroud human knowing within grace’s cloud of unknowing: an unknowing of forgiving and forgetting, a subjection of sin’s power to nothing – even, Kierkegaard suggests, to a form of un-creating, which, mirroring God’s creation ex nihilo, restores the forgiven self to a state of freedom.66 What emerges in this relation of self to God is not a God who stands over-and-against the self as an ‘infinitely sublime’ judicious ‘externality’,67 but a God who is, in Augustine’s terms, ‘intimior intimo meo, superior summo meo’ (‘more inward to me than the most inward part of me; and higher than my highest reach’).68 As Augustine’s Confessions affirms, before God I confess the sins I know and the sins I do not know, such that ‘what I do not know of myself, I will continue not to know until the time when my “darkness is as the noonday” [Isa. 58.10] in thy sight’.69 The self before God, therefore, is a self that comes to know itself as known by One who knows us greater than we know ourselves. And this unknowing and becoming known express the freedom of a soteriological faith

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

SUD, 95. SUD, 122. SUD, 122. JP 2:1383, p. 113 / SKS 24, NB22:78, p. 144. SUD, 114. See also CD, 107 and JP 2:1202, pp. 44–5 / SKS 18, HH:25, pp. 138–9. JP 2:1224, pp. 52–3 / SKS 26, NB32:89, p. 178–9. SUD, 80. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1999), 3.6.11. Augustine, Confessions, 10.5.7.

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in the divine meaning of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’. Despair and its self-inclosed epistemology is overcome by the relationship of faith to a Holy Other since, ‘To comprehend is the range of man’s relation to the human, but to believe is man’s relation to the divine.’70 Faith subjects the ‘despair’ (Fortvivlelse) of the self-knowing self-will to ‘doubt’ (tvivl), to an un-knowing which entails that the self is emptied out in ‘becoming nothing before God’:71 a kenotic loss of self-will distinct from the despairing loss of the self in the anonymity and inauthenticity of ‘the crowd’.72 This possibility of ‘becoming nothing’ is, however, always struggling with the possibility of ‘offence’ – the possibility or freedom to say ‘No’ to God, to resist the gift of forgiveness. Here the unremitting presence of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between the human and the divine bestows an unrestrained yet vulnerable space which renders both freedom and offence inexorable. In this respect, ‘The existence of an infinite qualitative difference between God and man constitutes the possibility of offence, which cannot be removed.’73 This irrevocable space sustains the irremediable possibility of offence which ensures the anxious freedom of the self; but it also provides ‘the guarantee whereby God protects himself against man’s coming too close’.74 More than this, the irrevocable space constitutes a profound wound in the divine. It marks God’s ‘unfathomable grief of love’: a divine love through which the human being is created free, even though this freedom is capable of crucifying divine love itself. God desires selves because God desires to be loved. But love, by its nature, must live in freedom and not coercion. Love must make itself vulnerable to the beloved: ‘Precisely this is Christ’s grief ’, that ‘he cannot do otherwise’, as Anti-Climacus reflects, ‘What a rare act of love, what unfathomable grief of love, that even God cannot remove the possibility that this act of love reverses itself for a person and becomes the most extreme misery – something that in another sense God does not want to do, cannot want to do.’75 There is a solemn mood of divine tragedy evident in this observation, one that reflects a sense of the infinite distance of a divine sorrow. God grieves over the nature of a relationship fractured by a freedom originally intended as a gift that makes true independence and reciprocity of love possible. The sense of an ‘act of love’ which ‘reverses itself for a person and becomes the most extreme misery’ speaks in one sense to the appearance of ‘offence’ as an expression of despair against the forgiveness of sin. In another sense, however, it speaks towards the struggle between love and misery which often marks the journey of the restless self before God, in its longing to rest transparently in God. For Kierkegaard, following a broadly Lutheran ordo salutis, soteriology is not only a question of the acceptance of the forgiveness of sins. From justification ensues sanctification: the working out of one’s salvation in ‘fear and trembling’ (Phil. 2.12). In following this narrow way, the human person may experience not only the infinite distance of God but also the intimate, yet agonistic, intimacy of living life before God. For Kierkegaard, this is freedom’s blessed expression: in faith to will to ‘become nothing before God’, to will to be oneself in relation to God (before God) such that one’s will is united to the divine will. The union of wills is, however, an agonistic loving struggle between the human

70 71 72 73 74 75

SUD, 95. SUD, 110; CUP, 461. SUD, 33–4, 121–3. SUD, 127. SUD, 125. SUD, 126.

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and the divine which one must give oneself to voluntarily: ‘The voluntary is suffering in faith’s struggle with God’.76 Such a voluntary kenosis of will is exemplified in Christ, whose ‘whole life is voluntary suffering’,77 in his life of constant ‘temptation’ (Fristelse) and ‘spiritual trial’ (Anfægtelse). What Kierkegaard, developing Luther and German mystical tradition, means by ‘temptation’ (Fristelse) and ‘spiritual trial’ (Anfægtelse) can be signified by a contrast between Christ’s ‘temptation’ in the wilderness, where Christ turns away from ‘lower’ desires (Matthew 4; Mark 1; Luke 4), and his ‘spiritual’ trial with a ‘higher’ struggle in Gethsemane, overcome through the prayer, ‘Father take this cup away from me, nevertheless, not my will but your will be done’ (Mt. 26.39; Lk. 22.42). Essentially, whereas ‘temptation’ (Fristelse) seeks to draw the human being down to the lower vices of the flesh, ‘spiritual trial’ (Anfægtelse) signifies the ‘collision’78 between the self-will and the divine will in the restless longing of Spirit for a life, which is a higher relation. As such, while temptation elicits that which is lowest in the human being, spiritual trial expresses the tension of struggling to relate to that which is highest. Essential to this vital category is the voluntary nature of suffering which this entails. So imperative to the life of Christians is this that ‘When the voluntary disappears, “spiritual trial” [Anfægtelse] disappears, and when spiritual trials disappear, Christianity disappears – as it has disappeared in Christendom.’79 In its authentic form, spiritual trial engages the human being with the full Angst of what it means to become a self ‘before God’ under the conditions of the ‘infinite qualitative abyss’. If one is prepared to exist ‘before God’ then one must be prepared for the infinite quality of such a God. This God does not represent ‘omnipotence’ in the human understanding of the term since this God surpasses all human projections of power. One does not grasp the concept of God; one is grasped by it. As Johannes Climacus dramatically elaborates, the bird in the cage, the fish on the beach, the invalid on his sickbed, and the prisoner in the narrowest prison cell are not as captive as the person who is captive in his conception of God, because, just as God is, the captivating conception is everywhere present and at every moment.80 As Kierkegaard develops this notion, the person in spiritual trial is also ‘by God or because of God imprisoned within himself ”.81 As such, the attempt to think the absolute is met by the absolute limit of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’: an impasse which grasps the self in its attempts to relate, in all its intricate actuality, to God. In this sense, Johannes Climacus describes the spiritual trial (Anfægtelse) of the absolute difference as ‘a nemesis [Anfægtelsen er Nemesis] upon the intense moments in the absolute relation’.82 Such a struggle demands nothing other than the self ‘becoming nothing’ before God.83

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

JP 4:4950, p. 548 / SKS 23, NB17:111, p. 250. JP 4:4950, p. 548 / SKS 23, NB17:111, p. 249. JP 6:6385, pp. 141–2 / SKS 21, NB10:179, p. 349. JP 4:4950, p. 548 / SKS 23, NB17:111, p. 250. See also PC, 109. CUP, 484. FSE, 19–20. CUP, 459. CUP, 461.

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V. THE SPIRIT OF PRAYER: BECOMING NOTHING IN THE IMAGE OF GOD The perennial temptation (Fristelse) on the path to selfhood is to give up and surrender oneself to a life of despair. But the true meaning of the spiritual trial (Anfægtelse) is that God desires the self to struggle on in the face of such ‘religious suffering’.84 After all, the agonistic and apophatic category of spiritual trial is the ‘essential form’ of the God-relationship85 and signifies that a human being is in the process of becoming Spirit. As such, ‘a person is not to give in; he is to fight against it, thank God that God has commanded that one ought to pray to him, for otherwise it is hardly possible to force one’s way through the spiritual trial [Anfægtelse]’.86 A person is to fight against despair through a paradoxical and kenotic movement of ‘becoming nothing before God’, echoing the counsel of (Eckhartian) mystical tradition and the ‘older and better devotional literature’87 to overcome Anfechtung through Abgeschiedenheit (detachment) and Gelassenheit (releasement):88 a letting go of creaturely attachments and a dying-to-self-will exemplified, as above, in Christ’s prayer at Gethsemane, ‘Nevertheless, not my will but your will be done.’ Such a denial of the self-will involves an apophatic negation of the self ’s understanding of God; and an affirmation of the need to cling to faith in the idea that God is love. One is therefore ‘to remember that God is love, the God of patience and consolation, and that God is not one who adopts vain titles but is completely different from anything I am able to comprehend of what he says himself to be’.89 In the moment of this dark night of the self before God, prayer emerges as perhaps the deepest and most humble affirmation of what it means to be a human being in relation to God. Prayer therefore realizes the idea that ‘to need God is a human being’s highest perfection’. The aspiration for divine-human union is consummated through the union of the divided human will with the simplicity of the divine will: it is through obedience’s denial of ambivalence that one can realize the plea from the Lord’s prayer, ‘ “Your will be done, as in heaven also on earth,” since by unconditional obedience your will is one with God’s will and therefore God’s will is done by you on earth as it is in heaven.’90 In this respect, prayer assumes a Christological form since prayer is undertaken in imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi) as well as in union with Christ. Here Christ emerges as the ‘the prototype [Forbilledet]’who has crossed the abyss before us and who crosses the abyss in us, the one who ‘consoles by showing that this, too, belongs’.91 Even in one’s most abyssal moments of apparent God-forsakenness, there is consolation in the thought that only Christ has truly felt what it means to be voluntarily God-forsaken: that unthinkable desolation which is ‘the last spiritual trial [Anfægtelse]’92 and ‘freedom’s ultimate spiritual trial [Anfægtelse]’.93 While human beings are spared the unfathomable abyss of the 84

85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93

‘Within religious suffering lies the category of spiritual trial [Anfægtelse], and only there can it be defined.’ CUP, 458. CUP, 461. JP 2:2008, p. 404 / SKS 21, NB7:59, p. 105. JP 4:4384, p. 272 / SKS 26, NB33:54, p. 301. See further David J. Kangas, Kierkegaard’s Instant: On Beginnings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 10. JP 2:2008, p. 404 / SKS 21, NB7:59, p. 105. WA, 32. JP 4:3903, p. 41 / SKS 25, NB30:101, p. 468. JP 4:4699, p. 423 / SKS 25, NB27:38, p. 151. JP 4:4611, p. 379 / SKS 20, NB4:95, p. 333.

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God-forsaken God, such spiritual trial constitutes ‘the proper emptying out of the human being standing face to face before God’. Although one may be tempted to despair at the sense of ‘feeling abandoned by God, of losing the conception of oneself ’, spiritual trial is a ‘human suffering’ which negates the self so that one may be empty enough to receive ‘the conception of himself again, on the highest level’.94 In its paradoxical relation of distance and intimacy, alterity and union, between the one who prays and the One to whom one prays, prayer becomes the ground on which one can stand before God, in the face of the infinite qualitative abyss. Prayer therefore embodies the struggle of the self before God in its heart’s restless desire to ‘rest [grunder] transparently in God’. This imagery is elaborated with intricate pathos and beauty in Kierkegaard’s upbuilding and Christian discourses. Here, prayer is recognized both as an agonistic struggle for ‘explanation’ (Forklaring) in the face of suffering and as a sanctuary of stillness and silence within which God’s ‘transfiguration’ (Forklarelse) of the self as Spirit, as the image of God, takes place. Spirit is restless in the longing to return to God. Spirit burns with desire such that it can be said that ‘Spirit is fire’ – and as fire it burns that which is opposed to it, transubstantiating the self from a selfhood of ‘the flesh’ to one of ‘Spirit’. ‘As gold is purified in fire, in the same way the Christian is purified’.95 Kierkegaard’s elaboration of Spirit in terms of the image of God inevitably unfolds against the paradoxical horizon of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between the human and the divine. While Anti-Climacus claims that to ‘worship’ ‘is to express that the infinite, chasmic, qualitative abyss between [self and God] is confirmed’,96 Kierkegaard also affirms that ‘worship is what makes the human being resemble God’. This resemblance is qualified, however, in the sense that ‘The human being and God do not resemble each other directly but inversely; only when God has infinitely become the eternal and omnipresent object of worship and the human being always a worshipper, only then do they resemble each other.’97 This self-God resemblance, in other words, is filtered through the infinite qualitative abyss between the human and the divine. As Christ crosses the abyss, so too does Spirit call out to God, de profundis, in worship and also in prayer itself. Spirit may be dreaming in the heart of melancholy, but even this melancholy can itself express the brooding awakening of the consciousness of Spirit.98 Even in melancholy longing, Spirit prays within the human being, releasing ‘unutterable sighs’ in the searching of the heart.99 What is more, ‘In the longing itself the eternal is, just as God is in the sorrowing that is after him.’100 It is Spirit who works the transfiguration of the self in relation to the image of God, thereby relating the self anew to ‘the world’ and to ‘the other’, inspiring ‘works of love’ towards the neighbour in which the self ’s inverse reflection of the invisible divine image shines through. Kierkegaard’s sense of Spirit as the invisible image of God is evoked in the

94 95 96 97 98 99

100

JP 4:3903, p. 41 / SKS 25, NB30:101, p. 468. JP 4:4355, p. 251 / SKS 26, NB32:122, p. 210. SUD, 129. UDVS, 193. EO2, 185–6. See further Kierkegaard’s student sermon from the Pastoral Seminary in 1841. JP 4:3915, pp. 45–55 / SKS 27, Papir 270, pp. 245–57. See also Judge William’s efforts to identify a nascent religious longing in the melancholy inertia of A, who laments that ‘My soul is like the Dead Sea, over which no bird is able to fly; when it has come midway, it sinks down, exhausted, to death and destruction.’ EO1, 37. CD, 260. See further Carl S. Hughes, Kierkegaard and the Staging of Desire: Rhetoric and Performance in a Theology of Eros (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 99–103.

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final of Kierkegaard’s eighteen upbuilding discourses, ‘One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and Is Victorious – in That God Is Victorious’ and in the discourse ‘What we Learn From the Lilies in the Field and From the Birds in the Air’.101 It is via the ‘transfiguration’ of prayer that the restless self is reconciled to the paradoxical relation of alterity and union. Whereas the human being as Spirit is an anxious synthesis of body and soul, ‘God is solely spirit’ – an identification that once more invokes the infinite qualitative difference. Yet, in paradoxical negation of this difference, Kierkegaard also affirms that ‘the God to whom [one] prays is human’ insofar as God is passionately ‘moved by the struggler’s cry’.102 This kenotic expression of God’s pathos – perhaps echoing the notion that Godforsakenness itself ‘belongs’ as part of the divine-human relation – is also reflected in the kenotic way of ‘becoming nothing’ which must characterize the self before God. Once one ‘becomes nothing’ then God will ‘illuminate [gjennemlyse] [one] so that [one] resembles God’. In other words, ‘God can imprint himself in him only when he himself has become nothing.’ Invoking a favoured metaphorical trope, Kierkegaard explains further that it is only once the ocean ‘becomes still and deep [dybt]’ that ‘the image of heaven sinks into its nothingness’.103 With imagery reminiscent of the mystical tradition, Kierkegaard develops the way that one’s nothingness embraces divine resemblance by pointing to how the image of heaven above penetrates into the resting depths of the ocean below. Having calmed the raging torrents of despair, the deep rests in a silent receptive nothingness which absorbs the image of heaven. As the sun’s light sinks into the depths, the nothingness is transfigured such that, from its abyssal heart, the ocean reflects the image of heaven back to itself. The ocean of the heart is no longer a raging abyss but has become resting and receptive, a deep and silent nothing. The ocean embraces heaven’s image, then from its abyssal heart reflects its light back to it. The one who has raged in the ‘life and death struggle’104 for ‘explanation’ (Forklaring) in prayer is now enabled to rest in a state of transfiguration (Forklarelse) through which one comes to resemble the image of God as it finds a place of ‘resting’ (grunder) within the abyss (Afgrund) of the human heart. Kierkegaard develops this relationship further in ‘What we Learn From the Lilies in the Field and From the Birds in the Air’, where the goal of becoming ‘nothing’ in inverse resemblance is seen as a realization of the scriptural dictum that ‘God created the human being in his image’.105 The lily of the field surpasses even the glory of Solomon; yet even the lily is not blessed in resembling God. The lily contains a trace which testifies to its creator, but not the image of the creator, such that the infinite qualitative difference between the created and a creator is confirmed even in its glory. By contrast, the human being, in its blessed state of ‘inverse resemblance’, confirms both the infinite qualitative difference between creature and creator, and the image of the creator which signifies a deeper intimacy. Reviving the imagery of ‘the mirror of the ocean’, Kierkegaard unfolds how this image of God is not a visual but an invisible image. In this respect, ‘When a person sees his image in the mirror of the ocean, he sees his own image, but the ocean is not his image, and when he departs the image disappears. The ocean is not the image

101 102 103 104 105

EUD, 377–401, and UDVS, 155–212, respectively. EUD, 399. EUD, 399. EUD, 401. UDVS, 192–3.

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and cannot keep the image’ once its source departs.106 The image of God, however, is reflected differently from visible forms since ‘God is spirit, is invisible, and the image of invisibility, of course, is in turn invisibility. Hence the invisible creator reproduces himself in the invisibility, which is the qualification of spirit, and the image of God is explicitly the invisible glory’.107 The image of the invisible God is Spirit, such that ‘To be spirit . . . is the human being’s invisible glory.’108 Visual images are reflected ephemerally on the water’s surface, while the image of God sinks deeply into the still abyss of the ocean, saturating its nothingness in a union that fills it with the invisible glory of transfiguration as Spirit. Through this, the human being comes to inversely resemble the invisible God; but, more than this, the self must also reflect the image of God in its relation to ‘the other’.109 In particular, the image is manifest through the love which expresses a wholly other form of forgiveness: an ‘impossible forgiveness’ which forgives that which is, ‘humanly speaking’, unforgiveable.110

CONCLUSIONS: BECOMING NOTHING; BECOMING ONESELF It is not, therefore, exclusively through the self ’s secret relation to God, but through loving relation to ‘the other’ that the self in its transparency comes to resemble God. This resemblance takes place through the regeneration of Spirit in the heart and purity of will. It is made visible in works of love towards ‘the other’ who, in the transfigurative relationship of Spirit, is now related to as ‘the neighbour’. In Spirit, ‘The concept of neighbour means a duplicating of one’s own self. Neighbour is what philosophers would call the other, by which the selfishness in self-love is to be tested.’111 The caricature of Kierkegaard’s acosmic solitary self, alone before God in fear and trembling, has been the subject of much expert critique that emphasizes the presence of a significant ethic of alterity in Kierkegaard’s wider thought. For Kierkegaard, God’s love creates a heart in the person, from which one becomes capable of offering a love that is unique to oneself, and which seeks to enable the other to love God.112 This relation of love to the other is essential to the individuation of the human being as it renders the self as a heart in its own right, and more than a ‘(mere) channel between God and neighbour’.113 The apparent solitude of the Kierkegaardian self is in reality a symptom of its lonely identity as Spirit in a world of ‘spiritlessness [Åndløsheden]’, as one who is an outsider to ‘the crowd’ and who suffers ‘before God in secret’.114 This agonistic solitude is therefore a tragic consequence of the decadence of Christendom, rather than a normative stance to be assumed for an ideal form of Christianity. The individuation of the self as Spirit is itself constituted by the aspiration for a community of love grounded in a mutual identity of Spirit. As opposed to the amorphous

106 107 108 109 110 111

112 113 114

UDVS, 192. UDVS, 192. UDVS, 193. WL, 380. SUD, 38. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love: Some Christian Reflections in the Form of Discourses, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong, preface by R. Gregor Smith (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 37. WL, 12. Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 252. CUP, 489.

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spiritlessness of ‘the crowd’, Spirit constitutes ‘the divine “We” which embraces an I and a third person’.115 Truly speaking, the category of life ‘Before God’ is itself ‘the source and origin of all individuality’ such that belief in one’s ‘authentic individuality’ demands that one ‘believe in the individuality of every other person; for individuality is not mine but is God’s gift by which he gives me being and gives being to all, gives being to everything’.116 Not only is every other person the image of God, but individuality itself is God’s gift of being to all beings. The call of Christ to ‘come unto me’ is a call to the excluded, the marginalized and the oppressed. It is for those in whom Spirit has become restless, ‘whose residence has been assigned among the grave’, to those ‘not buried, yet dead . . . belonging neither to life nor to death . . . you, too, come here, here is rest [her er Hvile], and here is life!’117 As this call to the restless Spirit suggests, to be a human being and to become Spirit demands a life lived between two worlds, a ‘death struggle’,118 and a ‘dying to’ the world.119 Yet while Spirit provokes a metamorphosis,120 it must also be remembered that no one is ‘completely Spirit’, nor can one become ‘absolute Spirit’ without being burned to ashes.121 ‘Alas, but we all carry the Spirit in fragile vessels.’122 This fragility is also essential to our ‘humanity’, understood as the limits and vicissitudes of our individual actuality. Sometimes ‘the humblest expression for the relationship with God is to acknowledge one’s humanness, and [that] it is human to enjoy oneself ’.123 The restless self ultimately longs for the horizon of ‘resting transparently in the power that established it’, at which point despair has been ‘completely rooted out’.124 However, the extent to which such a vision of the self as completely emptied of despair (sin) is realizable requires further exploration. Kierkegaard’s sense of ‘Spirit’ and ‘humanness’ might suggest that the state of ‘rest’ remains in an ongoing dialectic with the ‘restlessness’ of the ‘infinite qualitative abyss’, such that unity and alterity remain unresolved in life’s struggle of faith. While it may be uncertain whether a life without despair is possible, Kierkegaard does speak of the ‘perfection’ of the human being, albeit in characteristically paradoxical relation to one’s sense of need for God. In this sense, the sanctification of humanity means that the more one ‘comprehends that he is in need of God . . . then the more he in his need presses forward to God, the more perfect he is’.125 This need for God is, therefore, fed by the sense of ‘knowing oneself in one’s own nothingness’ which ‘is the condition for knowing God’. Such ‘knowing God’ is, furthermore, ‘the condition for the sanctification of a human being by God’s assistance and according to his intention’. Knowing God is not a matter of ‘the contemplation of his glory’ (theologia gloriae) but is rather an ongoing process of ‘creating’ such that ‘in becoming known by a person [God] wants to create in him a new human being’.126 Knowledge of God, therefore, is not an insight of speculative reason so much as it is knowing oneself as known by God (God

115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

JP 2:1651, p. 239 / SKS 18, FF:128, p. 100. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 1962 translation, 253. PC, 18. JP 4:4725, p. 438 / SKS 26, NB32:145, p. 238. JP 4:4354, pp. 250–1 / SKS 26, NB32:54, pp. 156–7. JP 4:4712, p. 432 / SKS 26, NB31:47, p. 35. JP 4:4372, pp. 262–3 / SKS 21, NB9:22, pp. 209–10. JP 4:3915, pp. 45–55 / SKS 27, Papir 270, pp. 245–57. CUP, 493. SUD, 14. EUD, 303. EUD, 325.

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pro me). Without knowledge of God, a human being would be unable to ‘grasp the first mystery of truth, that he himself is nothing at all, and then even less that to need God is his highest perfection’.127 As ‘the first mystery of truth’, becoming nothing marks only the beginning of the human being’s self-becoming in relation to God. Even in the more mystical imagery of ‘transparency’ and ‘resting in God’, the human being embodies the invisible image of God in an ‘inverse resemblance’ which retains alterity – just as one’s ‘perfection’ relies upon one’s sense of absolute need for God. The process of becoming a ‘new human being’ is a consummation of selfhood as Spirit, since even in the depths of unio mystica one does not ‘merge in God through a pantheistic fading away or in the divine ocean through the blotting out of all individual characteristics, but in an intensified consciousness’. Becoming oneself, as this particular human being, is a gift of love upheld to the extent that even ‘union with God still takes place in the personality clarified through this whole process’.128 Spirit therefore means ‘a presence of God in us’, in all and each of us, such that ‘your God takes up residence within you, is within you beyond all measure, is present within you’. This presence is within each human being, ‘even if you notice it first of all with his disappearance’,129 even if it first arises to consciousness as a presence in absence. To be human, after all, means to be in need of One who is ‘more inward to me than the most inward part of me; and higher than my highest reach’ (intimior intimo meo, superior summo meo).130

FURTHER READING Ferguson, Harvie. Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Søren Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology. London: Routledge, 1995. Gouwens, David J. Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Králik, Roman, Abrahim Khan, Jamie Turnbull and Andrew Burgess, eds. Acta Kierkegaardiana VI: Kierkegaard and Human Nature. Toronto: Kierkegaard Circle, 2013. Podmore, Simon D. Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Taylor, Mark C. Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

127 128 129 130

EUD, 326. JP 4:3887, p. 36 / SKS 17, DD:131, p. 259. JP 4:3915, pp. 45–55 / SKS 27, Papir 270, pp. 245–57. Augustine, Confessions, 3.6.11.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Sin: Leaping and Sliding and Mysteries Pointing to Mysteries JASON A. MAHN

INTRODUCTION Sin is a central concern of Søren Kierkegaard – personally and in terms of the method and substance of his Christian theology. The very titles of Kierkegaard’s best-known works in North America – including Fear and Trembling, The Sickness unto Death and The Concept of Anxiety – are enough to convince many of this ‘melancholic Dane’s’ fascination with temptation, sin and spiritual death. Kierkegaard did brood over temptation and sin, sometimes in quite personal ways. In 1846, he recalls how his father, ‘suffering painfully, hungry and exhausted, once stood on a hill and cursed God’1 and then again how Søren seemed to inherit his father’s guilt: ‘Merciful God, what a dreadful wrong my father did me in his melancholy – an old man who unloads all his depression on a poor child, to say nothing of what was even more dreadful.’2 Having broken his engagement to Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard attributes the choice to sin: ‘My sin is that I did not have faith, faith that for God all things are possible.’3 Even – and especially – when Kierkegaard writes stringently about Christian ideals, he describes himself as ‘personally and religiously a penitent’.4 Turning from personal musing to theological method, the consciousness of sin, by Kierkegaard’s own estimation, provides an indispensable component of the Gospel he seeks to clarify and pronounce. At the end of his first or early authorship with the publication of Concluding Unscientific Postscript in 1846, Kierkegaard insisted that ‘the religious continually uses the negative as the essential form’.5 Towards the end of his life he claimed that ‘everything essentially Christian is a redoubling, or every qualification of the essentially Christian is first of all its opposite’.6 Applying these characteristics to his own work, he describes his entire authorship as ‘helping negatively’,7 as ‘wounding 1 2 3

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JP 5:5874, p. 310 / SKS 18, JJ:416, p. 416. JP 5:6019, p. 389 / SKS 20, NB2:69, p. 170. JP 5:5521, pp. 176–7 / SKS 19, Notebook 8:20, pp. 230–1. For discussion of the journal passages in these first three notes, see Paul Sponheim, Existing Before God: Søren Kierkegaard and the Human Venture (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2017), xx–xxiii. JP 6:6317, p. 100 / SKS 21, NB9:56, p. 232. CUP, 524. JFY, 98. PV, 56.

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from behind’,8 as repelling and repulsing his readers with so much talk about sin and the possibility of offence that, oddly, they might be attracted to Christianity. Louis Mackey borrows from Thomas Aquinas in calling this literary technique a via remotionis, while Sylvia Walsh traces an ‘inverse dialectic’ throughout the second authorship.9 It would seem that the height of God’s love can properly be known only inversely, through ‘godly grief ’ and sorrow over sin. Indeed, Kierkegaard specifies the capacity for sin and the consciousness of sin to provide determinative ‘negatives’ essential for cultivating Christian dispositions. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he calls sin ‘the crucial point of departure for the religious existence’.10 Having portrayed Christianity as ‘terrifying and appalling’, Kierkegaard through Anti-Climacus asks how anyone could think of accepting it. His answer: ‘Very simply and, if you wish that also, very Lutheranly: only the consciousness of sin can force one, if I dare to put it that way . . . into this horror.’11 Also, according to Anti-Climacus, Christ ‘first and foremost wants to help every human being to become a self, requires this of him first and foremost, requires that he, by repenting, become a self, in order then to draw him to himself ’.12 There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of passages such as these where Kierkegaard writes of sin – especially of the consciousness of sin or repentance for sin – as absolutely essential both for Christian living and for Christian reflection and theology. That emphasis on sin helps explain some of the ambivalence of twentieth-century and contemporary receptions of Kierkegaard as a source for constructive theology. Before turning to Kierkegaard’s particular conceptions of sin, and how they operate within his broader theological thinking, it is helpful to note the way that Kierkegaard on sin has attracted and repelled Christian theologians and others within the last century.

I. KIERKEGAARD AND CONTEMPORARY HAMARTIOLOGY The reception of Kierkegaard’s hamartiology (his understanding of sin) has been mixed. On the one hand, it proved absolutely pivotal for the turn in early twentieth-century Protestant theology from the naive optimism of liberal theologies to the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth, Emil Brunner and Reinhold Niebuhr.13 The 1922 publication of the second edition of Römerbrief (The Epistle to the Romans) by Karl Barth (1886–1968) – which many regard as the belated beginning of twentieth-century theology itself – drew directly from Kierkegaard, emphasizing especially the infinite qualitative difference between humanity and God, a difference that Kierkegaard located even more in the fact of human sin than in the difference between infinite and finite being.14 Although Brunner and Barth

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CD, 161. Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 257–8; Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 149–63. CUP, 268. PC, 67. Note that Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Practice in Christianity, qualifies this claim by asserting that grace also pulls from the other side. PC, 160. Lee C. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 206. ‘Sin is the one and only predication about a human being that in no way, either via negationis or via eminentia, can be stated of God.’ SUD, 122.

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famously debated whether sin’s extent and damage nonetheless left a ‘point of contact’ between humanity and God, both drew from Kierkegaard in making their cases. Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner each also wrote of sin in terms of ‘the self inevitably succumbing to existential anxiety in distorting ways’15 – a shared characterization that shows the influence of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety. Thus, while disagreeing as to just how total the depravity of sin leaves us, both neo-orthodox/postliberal and correlationist/liberal theologians doubled down on Christian understandings of sin in the twentieth century, especially on the state of sin – Sin with a capital ‘S’ – and did so by retrieving the writings of Kierkegaard. On the other hand, no doctrine of the church has fallen out of general favour further than the doctrine of sin, especially when it accounts for the corrupt state brought about by the first sin, which is often called ‘hereditary’ or ‘original’ sin in Protestantism and Catholicism, and ‘ancestral’ sin in Eastern Orthodoxy. Kierkegaard, in considering sin as not only a responsible act but also as suprapersonal power or enduring state, is chief among those wishing to unpack original sin for the modern age and is therefore now under suspicion. In Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation, Barbara Brown Taylor laments the degree to which contemporary Christians resist sin-language in general. She notes that under special attack are Christian characterizations of sin such as those by Kierkegaard, that is, sin as not only a crime that individuals commit but also a disease that they inherit. Taylor (writing in 2001) sees the critique as coming from two opposing directions. Conservative churches tend to underscore personal responsibility for sin but often resist acknowledging the ways that social structures and other impersonal forces perpetuate racism, sexism, classism, consumerism, xenophobia, heteronormativity and other sins before and beyond the free choices of individuals. Liberal churches typically lament unjust structures but often resist calling individuals towards conviction, contrition and conversion – relegating such demands as little more than victim-blaming. Albeit for different reasons, then, churches on the left and on the right, according to Taylor, resist the very idea that sin names both a choice that individuals make and a power that ‘gets’ them even before they have the chance to choose.16 Such resistance by churchgoers is shared by contemporary theologians, who criticize traditionally Augustinian understandings of original sin for overplaying either individual freedom and responsibility or the radical nature of evil as an enduring state. Some implicitly critique Kierkegaard for tragically rooting sin in human nature itself, which blurs, if not erases, the theological distinction between God’s good creation and humanity’s sinful interruption of it. David Kelsey alludes to this when he tracks the contemporary ‘migration’ of the doctrine of sin into other theological loci.17 Traditional theology, argues Kelsey, housed sin within the doctrine of creation and so stressed the sharp divide between innocent finitude and culpable fault.18 This distinction grows fainter as the doctrine of sin moves into the context of theological anthropology, the first of three migrations that Kelsey recounts. According to Kelsey, a major strand of contemporary theology, largely influenced by Kierkegaard, reinscribes the drama of creation and Fall into theological

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Darby Kathleen Ray, chapter ed., ‘Sin and Evil’, in Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Approach to Classical Themes, ed. Serene Jones and Paul Lakeland (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 117–59 [134]. Barbara Brown Taylor, Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 2000), 37–40. David H. Kelsey, ‘Whatever Happened to the Doctrine of Sin?’, Theology Today 50, no. 3 (1992): 169–78. Ibid., 171.

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anthropology in such a way that fallenness becomes a component of the human condition as such. Whereas creation and Fall formerly designated two distinct periods in a temporal sequence, for many contemporary theologians they express, in mythological form, a single aspect of human consciousness, namely the awareness that we are not (and never were) what we should be.19 Expressing concern about the implications of this trend – which is initiated and epitomized by Kierkegaard – Kelsey writes, ‘ “Finitude” and “sin” are so closely tied together that they may seem to be two descriptions of the same reality looked at in two different respects . . . The “goodness” of finite reality, so central to the traditional doctrine of sin, seems to be in question.’20 While Kelsey does not explicitly name Kierkegaard as one who writes fallenness immediately onto the human condition, many of the theological anthropologies he does mention (those of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Edward Farley and Karl Rahner) are indebted to Kierkegaard, especially to The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death – two texts we will analyse below. Wolfhart Pannenberg does criticize Kierkegaard explicitly on this front. By portraying human nature as so fragile, anxious and predisposed to posit itself as its own ground (and thus to depose God), Kierkegaard makes sin appear inevitable if not altogether necessary. By so vividly tracing the contours of fragility and fallibility, Kierkegaard seems to take something from the innocence of created humanity.21 Others critique Kierkegaard (again by way of his twentieth-century neo-orthodox interpreters) for exactly the opposite reason, that is, for not considering sin as tragic enough. They argue that interpretations of sin as a free decision – by Adam and/or by the rest of us – ineluctably overshadow interpretations of sin as an enduring condition. Feminist theologian Kathleen Sands, for example, argues that ‘original sin’ today primarily serves to underscore the non-essentialness of evil rather than its tragic nature. By situating the origin of evil within a neat tripartite framework (paradise given, paradise lost and paradise regained and redeemed), the standard Christian narrative passes over claims about evil’s inevitability and endurance in favour of highlighting its accidental origination and eventual elimination. Sands writes, ‘Within the Christian theological tradition, original sin and fallenness are the vestiges of nonculpable fault. But their tragic character is sanitized and resolved by placing fallenness between an original paradise and a perfect ending, when the guilty conditions of human existence will be no more.’22 Such sensibilities are shared by other feminist theologians who deconstruct neoorthodoxy’s privileging of the sin of pride (what Kierkegaard calls the sin of willing to be oneself apart from God) over the sin of hiding (the sin of not willing to be oneself as a creature of God, which Kierkegaard explicitly links to ‘feminine’ despair23). Such feminist

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Compare here Wolfhart Pannenberg’s description of the shift from Augustinian conceptions to the modern concentration, initiated by Kant, on a human being’s self-relation. Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985), 94–6. Kelsey, ‘Whatever Happened’, 173–4. Pannenberg, Anthropology, 98–9. Kathleen M. Sands, Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 16. SUD, 49–50. See Susan Nelson Dunfee, ‘The Sin of Hiding’, Soundings 65 no. 3 (1982): 316–27; Valerie Saiving, ‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’, Journal of Religion 40, no. 2 (1960): 100–12; and Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980). See also the helpful discussion of Kierkegaard’s appeal to ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ despair, and feminist reactions and re-appropriations, in Sponheim, Existing Before God, 27–9, 115–17. The feminist critiques of ‘masculine’ sin typically fall on Kierkegaard through Reinhold Niebuhr, who sees ‘that pride is more basic than sensuality and that the latter is, in some way, derived from the

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critiques essentially suggest that wilful evil, a possibility available only to those with unfettered agency backed by institutional power, has overshadowed the more common female experience of loss of agency and bondage to one’s social location. Sin, according to the popular (and patriarchal) viewpoint, almost always manifests itself through wilful actions of individuals who think too much of themselves. Forgotten are the real limits, disempowerment and failures due to weakness rather than strength that women often more readily feel and notice. Although these opposing critiques can make it seem as though Kierkegaard’s hamartiology is appreciated by none, the very fact that robust debate within twentieth-century theology is centred around these themes suggests that Kierkegaard profoundly influences most, if not all, contemporary theological engagements with sin. What is more, the fact that opposing theological sensibilities critique opposing ‘sides’ of Kierkegaard’s hamartiology while drawing directly from the other side is reason to believe that Kierkegaard managed to hold together what has been rent asunder by other theological appropriations. Kierkegaard’s hamartiology is distinctive among broadly Augustinian thinkers for striking a near-perfect balance between conceiving of sin in terms of personal choice and individual responsibility and in terms of tragic forces and structures – for Kierkegaard, the tragic structure of conscious selfhood itself. Note, too, that the balance Kierkegaard achieves accounts profoundly for social, and not only individual, dimensions of sin. Such an account should complicate easy and common stereotypes of Kierkegaard’s ‘individualism’. In revitalizing and ‘remythologizing’ the story of the Fall for a modern audience, Kierkegaard essentially reconnects individual responsibility to shared, tragic circumstances in a way that presents sin as a paradox or mystery that must be confessed precisely because it cannot be fully comprehended. What is more, and despite Kelsey’s portrayal of a migration into anthropology, Kierkegaard also reconnects understandings (but never reductive comprehensions) of sin to human receptions of grace and to the person and work of Christ. Sin is a mystery that best functions, within Christian theology and within a person’s consciousness, as pointing to other more central Christian mysteries: ‘First of all, Christianity proceeds to establish sin so firmly as a position that the human understanding can never comprehend it; and then it is this same Christian teaching that again undertakes to eliminate this position in such a way that the human understanding can never comprehend it.’24 If anything, the ‘migration’ undertaken by Kierkegaard entails a homecoming of hamartiology into Christology and soteriology; sin must be understood as that from which Christians are saved, even while the offer of such salvation, mysteriously enough, also opens up possibilities for new and more devastating sin. We turn first to Kierkegaard’s place in the Pauline-Augustinian tradition when it comes to original sin.

II. SIN-SICK Paul Ricoeur helpfully names interpretations of sin or evil that emphasize human choice, responsibility and guilt as comprising the ‘Adamic myth’. He names the necessity of evil by way of its enduring structures or fate, ‘the tragic’. Such designations initially imply that the myth of Adam and Eve’s disobedience in Genesis 3 is entirely about choice, personal responsibility and just punishment, while explorations of the fatal flaw occasioning such

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former’. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, 2 vols (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1941–3), vol. 1, 198, as cited in Sponheim, Existing Before God, 110. SUD, 100.

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failure are reserved for Greek tragedies. However, close readings of the Genesis 3 myth – as exhibited by Ricoeur himself – perceive that ‘tragic’ circumstances are also part of the very story of sin’s alleged ‘origin’. While Genesis 3 serves as the foundation for Christian understandings of sin as an act of wilful disobedience, the text thereby also witnesses to the fragility and fallibility that always already situate and anticipate the Fall. Adam’s sin is anticipated and induced by Eve’s; hers is occasioned by the talking serpent; the serpent’s manifestation is explained only by the fact that he was created crafty; the God who creates crafty serpents also places humanity’s limit (represented by the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil) not at the outskirts of Eden but in the centre of the garden, where the man and woman cannot help but face it.25 The need to narrate the decisive point of evil’s origin seems here ineluctably to get ahead of itself; the fault or rift is recursively anticipated in the reverberations of fault lines26 – lines between humans and God, between humans and the natural world and between the first two human beings. In fact, it would be hard to imagine narrative qua narrative doing otherwise. Insofar as it sets even the most radical of ruptures within a plot that has (always?) already begun, the story of the Fall must anticipate the very event whose ultimate origin it is trying to communicate. Perhaps it is true that all stories of beginnings begin opaquely.27 For his part, Ricoeur sees in this slippage, this seemingly natural slide from vulnerability and weakness to fault and guilt within the Adamic myth, a ‘reaffirmation of the tragic’.28 At the level of narrative, then, human responsibility for sin and humanity’s vulnerability to tragic structures and circumstances seem to hold together just fine. When it comes to Christian doctrine, however, they seem preserved only by way of a number of categorical distinctions. Christian theology has consigned the suprapersonal, extramoral dimension of sin (‘the tragic’) to the effects brought about by the first sin, which is now called ‘hereditary’, ‘ancestral’, or ‘original’ (i.e. originated) sin. With additional distinctions between original and actual sin, sin as inherited versus sin as chosen, sin as sickness versus sin as crime, the theological tradition developed language to talk about the condition of Sin as an enduring state and humanity’s responsibility for choosing it. Yet it did so almost always by distinguishing two very different meanings of ‘sin’. This ambiguity in sin’s meaning correlates to (and largely stems from) two developments in Augustine’s own life and thinking. The biography is well known. Augustine first distances himself from his early, Manichean understanding of evil and suffering as a natural part of existence (‘the tragic’) and emphasizes instead the original goodness of creation and humanity’s culpability for making it otherwise (‘the Adamic’). Towards the end of his life, and in light of the emphasis by Pelagius (ca. 360–420) on human responsibility and our concomitant ability not to sin, Augustine speaks of sin as a condition into which we are born, a disease that infects us long before we choose it. This comprises something of a reaffirmation of the tragic in its own right.29 When Augustine eventually articulates

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Compare Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, Temptation: Two Biblical Studies (New York: Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster, 1959), 53–62. Ricoeur uses the French world faille (fault) to play with this equivocation between trespass and geological rift. See Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 7n32, 140n6. Edward F. Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 155. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 310–26. This change in Augustine’s approach to sin can be marked by comparing his early On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), with, for example, ‘The Predestination of the Saints’,

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both positions at once, he says that each person is freely bound to sin – necessarily. A person is responsible for choosing the disease from which he or she suffers; he or she becomes infected by his or her own fallen freedom. In light of the necessarily paradoxical language (choosing disease, catching guilt) that points to this unified understanding of sin/Sin, already with Augustine the tradition finds it essential to neatly distinguish the Adamic and the tragic ‘parts’ of sin. Infant baptism would be understood as immunizing a child from the sinful power into which each person is tragically born. The practices of penance, increasingly codified through the Middle Ages, would become understood as the just punishment for subsequent sinful acts of individuals. Slowly but surely, the ambiguity of being sin-sick that is so subtly narrated by the author of Genesis 3 and experienced by many who – like the early Augustine30 – feel in their own lives a deep, inextricable coalescence of personal conviction and tragic compulsion, ends up getting separated out at the level of theological concepts and Christian doctrine. There is Sin and there are sins. There is a disease from which we suffer and crimes for which we are responsible. There is the innocent – indeed, now perfect – situation of Eve and Adam and there is the state of total sin in which the rest of us (almost now a different species) find ourselves. The fact that one term, ‘original sin’, can name both the first sin and the condition originated by that sin does not bring those very different conceptions any closer together. Augustine famously tries to reconnect them by linking procreation to sinful concupiscence, making each child the ‘victim of sin’.31 And yet, this explanation fails to work, precisely by being explanatory and conceptual rather than centered in story, imagery and symbols.32

III. THE ORIGIN OF SIN: KIERKEGAARD’S REMYTHOLOGIZING OF GENESIS 3 Kierkegaard’s first of two major treatises on sin tries to put back together what is joined at the level of biblical narrative but had been divided by much of the Christian theological tradition. Or better: Kierkegaard intentionally blurs the line that hitherto too clearly separated the state of Sin from individual sinful acts and Adam from the human race. He redraws it, instead, between two different perspectives by way of which the single reality of sin must be known. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin was published in 1844, the year Nietzsche was born and early in Kierkegaard’s ‘first authorship’, the corpus up through Concluding Unscientific

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in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, vol. 26: Answers to the Pelagians IV, ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1999), 149–90. Augustine’s ‘explanation’ for why he stole pears as an adolescent emphasizes the tragic circumstances occasioning his failure (‘alone I would not have done it, could not conceivably have done it by myself ’) but maximizes as well his own responsibility (‘my pleasure was not in the pears; it was in the crime itself ’). Given this confluence of choice and fate, the sin becomes mysterious to Augustine – a ‘twisted and tangled knot’ – even and especially as he confesses it. See Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 30–4. Hans Schwarz, The Christian Faith: A Creedal Account (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2014), 85. While Augustine solidified such theories, the ‘traducianist’ understandings of the sinful condition into which one is born – one’s sin is transferred by birth from mother to child – were first introduced by Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 212). Schwarz, The Christian Faith, 83. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Original Sin: A Study in Meaning’, in The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, trans. Peter McCormick (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974).

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Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’. Subtitle notwithstanding, and like the writings of Nietzsche, The Concept of Anxiety is anything but simple. Gordon Marino frankly confesses that it is a ‘maddeningly difficult book’. Edward Mooney calls it ‘nearly impenetrable’. Joakim Garff writes that it ‘comes rather close to being unreadable’.33 When readers do make sense of it, they commonly interpret it as a psycho-theological investigation into original and subsequent sin. Yet note here that ‘original’ refers both to Adam’s sin and to the first sin of each individual. Kierkegaard here takes pains not to place Adam ‘fantastically’ outside human history. ’Adam – Kierkegaard with the tradition understands the Hebrew to mean ‘the man’ – is one of us, if also in idealized form. The Concept of Anxiety offers an extended phenomenological or ‘psychological’ account of human anxiety while gesturing towards the doctrinal issue of hereditary sin. But the pseudonymous author – Vigilius Haufniensis, a ‘watchman over the harbor’ – also refuses to theorize about how phenomenology and theology relate, that is, how observing anxiety affects one’s understanding of sin. Ironically, the work entails an extended critique of ‘speculative’ objectivity, yet it is written through an observational (‘watching’) psychologist who, with ample objectivity, ‘sits and traces the contours and calculates the angles of possibility’, and who is ‘disturbed’ no more than Archimedes.34 Throughout, Haufniensis recombines a number of elements that other theologians, before and after Kierkegaard, have split apart under the weight of conceptual clarity. I will here trace two reconnections. First, as has already been mentioned, Haufniensis reconnects Adam with the rest of the human race. Whatever can be known about how and why any individual succumbs to sin applies also to Adam, and vice versa. Haufniensis thus emphatically claims that ‘innocence is lost only by guilt. Every man loses innocence in the same way that Adam lost it. It is not in the interest of ethics to make all men except Adam into concerned and interested spectators of guiltiness, but not participants in guiltiness’.35 Haufniensis (and Kierkegaard here too) essentially agrees with Augustine that each individual is both corrupt and responsible for that corruption. Unlike Augustine, however, he feared that personal responsibility and the necessity of contrition and confession would only be assuaged by saying that Adam created a state of sin which is then automatically transmitted through the generations.36 Indeed, Haufniensis rejects all causal explanations for sin.37 He takes pains to tell the story of Adam as one’s own story precisely because only that identification and recognition serves to convict and edify a person: ‘How sin came into the world, each man understands solely by himself. If he would learn it from another, he would eo ipso misunderstand it’.38 Understandings of sin need to be edifying – and that purpose is prevented by understanding Adam in different terms than one understands oneself; Adam rather must become a ‘mirror to illuminate our own lives’.39 In Kierkegaard’s own terms, ‘Sacred history, if it be true, must be fabula, quae de me narrator – a story that narrates me.’40

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Gordon D. Marino, ‘Anxiety in The Concept of Anxiety’, in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 308–28 [308]; Mooney, On Søren Kierkegaard, 107; Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 541. CA, 23. CA, 36. Compare Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying, 231. Ibid., 230. CA, 51. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying, 231. SKP V B 53:13, as cited in CA, 186. It should be noted that Augustine does in fact see the story of Adam in his own story, and perhaps vice versa. Is it coincidence, for example, that he chooses to narrate the sin of stealing

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The second reconnection that Haufniensis makes goes directly to the central dimensions of sin we have been considering – sin as responsible act and sin as tragic state. I have suggested these very different conceptions often seem to warrant different doctrinal foci (moral crimes versus the state of Sin), different discursive homes (legal metaphors versus medical models), different practices of the church (penance versus baptism) and even different characterizations of Christ (as forensic judge and healing saviour). By paradoxically linking tragic structures to the very indeterminacy of freedom itself, Haufniensis prevents them from being understood as wholly different or mutually exclusive – the more freedom, the less fate, and vice versa. Rather, he presents freedom as having its own self-involved fatedness, so to speak. In his retelling, it is the very indeterminacy of freedom that ineluctably produces a dizzying effect, which in turn almost inevitably leads to (but does not cause) moral failure. Much here depends on the anxiety or Angst (Danish Angest) to which Haufniensis devotes his book. The Concept of Anxiety goes beyond earlier portrayals by distinguishing Angst, the discontent over one’s own freedom and the seemingly unlimited possibilities accompanying it, from fear, the more determinate and transitory response to a specific threat or danger. Unlike fear of an object, event or other person, the contours of anxiety are reflective and ‘subjective’ and therefore are difficult to trace. Of course, anxiety is not subjective in the sense of being imaginary or idiosyncratic. But it is subjective insofar as the ‘object’ causing the Angst is oneself. Indeed, anxiety registers the very indeterminacy of one’s own freedom, an ‘object’ that never presents itself to one’s own gaze. In some ways, human anxiety helps ‘explain’ the onset of sin. Yet Haufniensis also quickly spots the danger that explanations for sin might explain sin away. He evokes his trope of the ‘leap’ to resist such reductive explanations, as proffered by any closed system of thought such as Hegel’s logical system. Haufniensis must therefore consider the relationship between human understanding and what he refers to as the ‘leap’ into sin.41 Logic cannot make sense of the choice to sin without reducing its qualitative uniqueness to quantitative determinations. He mocks the way speculative philosophy aligns historical becoming with an immanent movement of logic. Regarding evil as ‘the negative’, as does Hegel in his Philosophy of Right, transforms moral evil, which is otherwise ‘sudden’ and ‘enigmatic’, into a logical transition that is deducible from what has gone before. Mocking this error, Haufniensis compares Hegel’s ability to bring a qualitative state – sinfulness – out of quantitative determinations to a child chanting ‘one-nis-ball, two-nis-balls, threenis-balls’ and expecting that the rhyme will eventually bring about tennis balls.42 Haufniensis can sound here as though he is doing little more than following the tradition in clearly distinguishing the leap into sin from the state of innocence over and against Hegel’s desire to treat them as quantitative mediations within a single logical system. And yet, recall that Haufniensis’s primary subject is the concept of anxiety. And it is anxiety that Haufniensis, from a second, ‘psychological’ perspective, introduces as the ‘intermediate term’ necessary for understanding how the choice to sin interrupts the state of innocence.43 Although the leap into sin is sudden and unforeseeable, the fragility of

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pears from a tree as the central failure of his youth? Or is his telling a rewriting of Adam and Eve’s eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil? Each story recounts the choice when there is absolutely no reason to choose it and therefore underscores the absurdity of sin. See Augustine, Confessions, 30–4. CA, 29–35. CA, 32. Compare the fun that Climacus has with those who assume one can make the qualitative leap more manageable by getting a running start. CUP, 99. CA, 49.

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the self and the anxiety that emerges provide a context out of which sin arises, seemingly assuaging the absoluteness of its eruption. Moreover, whereas the onset of sin is a qualitative change, anxiety can grow in quantitative terms. Anxiety increases as the ‘nothing’ of sin’s possibility appears ‘more and more [as] a something’ through inherited sinfulness.44 It should here be noted that ‘sinfulness’ for Haufniensis indicates the increased possibility for new and greater sin, not a static state of actual sin. Moreover, the ‘possibility of sin’ does not necessarily correspond to the probability of sinning but points instead to a volitional possibility that can be become more or less available according to the character of a moral agent. Through anxiety, then, the still innocent individual nonetheless ‘approaches’ the leap into sin, and ‘innocence is [thereby] brought to its uttermost’.45 At this point, Haufniensis seems to suggest that one’s anxious self-relation commonly results in the choice to sin. One should take notice of these very different perspectives and the opposing function of each: Haufniensis’s moral/doctrinal voice condemns Hegel’s mediation and conceptuality, emphasizing personal responsibility for the leap. At the same time, a second, ‘psychological’ voice introduces a mediating concept between innocence and guilt – the concept of anxiety. On the moral/doctrinal side of this incongruity, Haufniensis repeatedly asserts that no quantitative determination prior to the leap into sin can lead up to or explain moral evil. Only confession of guilt can get at the nature of sin. On the psychological side, he nonetheless presents the phenomenon of anxiety as a way of situating or contextualizing this leap. What does one make of this disparity? After all, the psychological analysis of anxiety seems to mitigate against the moral condemnation of the sinner by suggesting that ‘the fall into sin always takes place in weakness’ and that the one ‘who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become’.46 On the one side of the fault line is the sudden ‘leap’; on the other, a gradual ‘slide’. On the one side is the qualitative interruption of the will; on the other, human fragility, which quantitatively increases and finally succumbs. I want to claim that these dual (and dueling?) perspectives or voices – while seeming to break apart the tragic from the Adamic, or slide from leap – actually serve to hold them together. We have here not a single narration of two chapters of a story but rather two different perspectives on a single complexity. Like Ricoeur’s ‘reaffirmation of the tragic’, the same ‘event’ can be seen to include both the qualitative leap and qualitative slide. Haufniensis is thus able to re-narrate the story of the Fall that layers tragic vulnerability and guilty choices on top of one another, without thereby confusing created innocence with culpable guilt. 44

45 46

CA, 61. From such lines, one notices that there are relative differences between Adam as a first sinner and subsequent sinners, or between one’s first sin and the sins that seem so naturally to follow. Elsewhere, Haufniensis claims that, whereas Adam experiences limitless possibility, becoming dizzy by the utter indeterminacy of the ‘possibility of possibility’ (42), every person after Adam (Haufniensis describes them as ‘derived’) becomes anxious over a particular possibility – the possibility of sin. Postlapsarian individuals perceive sin in the world and have a presentiment that they too will become sinners, which in turn makes them anxious and more susceptible to succumbing. Although their presentiments and ensuing anxiety do not cause moral failure, they make sin increasingly possible or even ‘easier’ (60). Haufniensis accordingly writes of the ‘nothingness’ of possibility gradually becoming ‘more and more a something’, without ceasing to be nothing (61). He admits that ‘since the race does not begin anew with every individual, the sinfulness of the race does indeed acquire a history’ (33). CA, 45. CA, 61.

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Take, for example, Haufniensis’s famous description of anxiety and the onset of sin through his analogy of a person standing over the chasm of his own self-consciousness, experiencing vertigo and succumbing to dizziness. This re-narration of the Fall includes two sets of images that lie on either side of the psychological-doctrinal fault line: Anxiety may be compared to dizziness. He whose eye [Øie] happens to [kommer til at] look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit [vil sætte] the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold [griber] of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs [segner] in this dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment [Øieblikke] everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments is the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become. Anxiety is a feminine weakness in which freedom faints. Psychologically speaking, the fall into sin always takes place in weakness. But anxiety is of all things the most selfish.47 Throughout this passage Haufniensis uses two contrasting figures – the eye and freedom – as metonyms for the falling individual. The ‘eye’ portrays failure as an inability to withstand the anxious disequilibrium induced by the fathomless pit. Disequilibrium culminates in dizziness and fainting, neither of which suggests free choice of the will and both of which emphasize a quantitative increase in anxiety that gradually overtakes a person. Alternatively, ‘freedom’ emphasizes the self ’s volition. Freedom ‘wants to posit the synthesis’ and so ‘lays hold’ of (gribe: to seize or clutch) the finite for security. Whereas the eye suggests the passivity and perhaps inevitability of failure, freedom suggests the responsibility of the one who sins. Interestingly, the metonyms also exchange characteristics – without becoming unified. Haufniensis notes the eye’s responsibility for the vertigo (‘it is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down’), even though he first described the eye as accidentally having ‘happen[ed] to look down’. Freedom, too, both ‘leaps’ into sin and faints in ‘feminine weakness’. It grasps after finitude but also ‘succumbs’ to (segner: ‘drops’, ‘sinks into’) a dizziness that gets the best of it. Haufniensis here somewhat erratically conveys both the fragility and the fault of sinners; he both condemns the one who falls and assuages the sinner’s guilt. He depicts moral failure as both a quantitative slide and a qualitative leap. Haufniensis even asserts that the purpose of such alternating depictions is to maximize ambiguity: ‘He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.’48 Haufniensis captures this ambiguity in the ‘moment’ in which the Fall occurs. Literally, ‘moment’ (Øieblikke) means a ‘blink of the eye’, but in colloquial Danish it can also mean the eye’s sideway glance, a brief looking away. The first meaning suggests a failure no more intentional than blinking or needing to sneeze. The second connotes an intentional diversion, an unwillingness to be attentive. At least when one privileges the rich narrative of Genesis 3 over a reified doctrine of original sin, one notices a similar dissonance in the fabric of the story – a dissonance that

47 48

CA, 61. CA, 61.

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Haufniensis recovers rather than resolves. At fullest narrative stretch, the Fall is a tragedy as well as a choice. If the slide and the leap cannot be held together conceptually, as Haufniensis readily admits, they do come together at the level of narrative. But why this retelling? Certainly Kierkegaard through Haufniensis is trying to do justice to the complexity of moral responsibility and tragic circumstance, neither of which do away with the other. But he is also moving toward an understanding of sin’s inherent mysteriousness that would point to the mystery of grace and redemption. Pseudonymous author Anti-Climacus takes up that very task.

IV. THE ELIMINATION (AND CONTINUATION) OF SIN: KIERKEGAARD’S CHRISTOCENTRIC HAMARTIOLOGY In many ways, Kierkegaard’s central concern is to make Christianity as a whole strange again within a cultural Christendom that constantly domesticates, explains, normalizes and relativizes it. The same is true of his particular concern with sin. Against a culturalecclesial synthesis that would reduce decidedly Christian positions on sin to a more general condemnation of ‘moral evil’, Kierkegaard seeks to make sin strange – and does so largely as backhanded witness to the strangeness of God’s grace through Christ. By turning from Haufniensis’s The Concept of Anxiety to the first work authored under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, The Sickness unto Death,49 one both further tracks the mysteriousness of sin and also glimpses the mysterious way that, rightly understood and withstood, it points toward Christian good news. Or again: Kierkegaard plumbs the mystery of sin first and foremost in order to fathom something of the immensity of redemption by God through Christ. In this sense, too, he belongs squarely in the Pauline-Augustinian (and Lutheran50) tradition, although he also parts from that tradition in at least one important sense, as discussed at the end of this chapter. Anti-Climacus puts the matter directly in a passage that concludes a chapter within The Sickness unto Death entitled, ‘Sin is not a Negation but a Position’: The qualification that sin is a position implies in a quite different sense the possibility of offense, the paradox. That is, the paradox is the implicit consequence of the doctrine of the Atonement. First of all, Christianity proceeds to establish sin so firmly as a position that the human understanding can never comprehend it; and then it is this same Christian teaching that again undertakes to eliminate this position in such a way that the human understanding can never comprehend it . . . Christianity, which was the first to discover paradoxes, is as paradoxical on this point as possible; it seems to be working against itself by establishing sin so securely as a position that now it seems to be utterly impossible to eliminate it again – and then it is this very Christianity that by means of the Atonement wants to eliminate sin as completely as if it were drowned in the sea.51

49

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Paul Tillich asserted that every theologian should read these two books. See Sponheim, Existing Before God, 105. Kierkegaard invents the pseudonym Anti-Climacus to be a foil to Johannes Climacus (‘John the Climber’) and explains that ‘whereas Johannes Climacus places himself so low that he even says himself that he is not a Christian, one seems to be able to detect in Anti-Climacus that he regards himself to be a Christian on an extraordinarily high level’. JP 6:6433, p. 174 / SKS 22, NB11:209, p. 130. In his battle with Erasmus of Rotterdam (1462–1536) over freedom versus bondage of the will, Martin Luther (1483–1546) also perceived the real threat of all forms of Pelagianism to be in the way they sidestep humanity’s utter reliance on God for bringing about salvation. SUD, 100.

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Notice here how the very incomprehensibility of sin – including what Kierkegaard calls the paradox of hereditary sin52 – is followed by the even more paradoxical fact that sin is utterly eliminated by God through Christ. That pairing of sin and forgiveness/reconciliation, and the even-more-excessiveness of the latter, echoes this early articulation by the Apostle Paul of what would become the doctrine of original sin: If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.53 Unlike much of the subsequent Augustinian tradition, which thought it important to explain how exactly the sin of Adam leads to the condemnation of all (for Augustine, through the biological inheritance of sinful concupiscence), nowhere here or elsewhere does Paul explain how all participate in the sin of Adam or in the righteousness of Jesus, the new Adam. Paul is simply concerned that condemnation and sin always be understood as that from which Jesus sets one free. He is also concerned that emphasis be put on the excess – the ‘much more’ and ‘all the more’54 – with which grace abounds. A similar Christocentric hamartiology, that is, an understanding of sin as refracted through an understanding of Christ, helps explain why Augustine so surprisingly distanced himself from the Pelagian avowals of a person’s freedom not to sin, emphasizing instead the ‘bondage of the will’. It is not so much that Pelagius and Pelagians had too high an anthropology, an overly optimistic assessment of a person’s capabilities. Rather, according to Augustine, they had too low a Christology. They understood Jesus as an example and teacher of what each person can and should do: lead a sinless life. Jesus was not for them primarily a liberator or saviour since their exclusively moral understandings of sin as willful disobedience warranted judgement and forgiveness but not deliverance and healing.55 Reading the ‘problem’ of sin back from the ‘answer’ of liberation and salvation, Augustine emphasizes the bondage of the will and sin (or rather, Sin) as an inherited condition. A similar logic governs the passage by Anti-Climacus quoted above. It is precisely because atonement through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus ‘wants to eliminate sin as completely as if it were drowned in the sea’ that sin first must be established securely as a position, and that all loose ends are fastened through the paradox of original sin.56 The only alternative is what Anti-Climacus and, before him, Johannes Climacus call a Socratic understanding of sin, which, like Pelagianism, essentially reduces sin to ignorance and Jesus to a human teacher.57 In Philosophical Fragments, Climacus is clear about the logical priority of the radicalness of redemption and salvation, in light of which sin also must be understood in more than moral categories. Having portrayed Socratic understandings of error and learning, Climacus notes that ‘if the situation is to be different, then the moment

52 53 54 55

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SUD, 93. Rom. 5.17-19. Compare 1 Cor. 15.20-3. Rom. 5.15, 17, 20. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 353–64. Augustine considered his anti-Pelagian writings to comprise his causa gratiae, his case for grace (354). SUD, 100, 93. SUD, 87–100; PF, 9–18.

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in time [of Christ’s advent] must have such decisive significance that for no moment will I be able to forget it’. He then defines sin in light of this understanding of the uniqueness of Christ: ‘Now if the moment is to acquire decisive significance, then the seeker up until that moment must not have possessed the truth, not even in the form of ignorance . . . [rather] he has to be defined as being outside the truth’,58 a state for which Climacus playfully presumes to invent the label sin.59 Anti-Climacus is even clearer about the seemingly backwards logic from grace to sin when he asserts so casually that ‘the paradox [of sin as a position] is the implicit consequence of the doctrine of the Atonement’.60 Indeed, from the very beginning of The Sickness unto Death Anti-Climacus describes his final definition of sin – ‘before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself ’ – as pure algebra, deduced from his definition of faith, ‘the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out’.61 He explains that ‘for me to begin to describe particular sins in this little book would be out of place, and, furthermore, the attempt might fail’.62 Over and against G. K. Chesterton, who is among those attributed with the adage, familiar in twentieth-century theology, that original sin is the only Christian doctrine that can be empirically demonstrated by reading the daily newspaper, Anti-Climacus asserts that the ‘miserable condition’ of sin is not something that one can look at directly, much less empirically. Sin is something that ‘man as such does not know’; it takes a revelation from God to learn what sin is.63 As I have suggested elsewhere, Kierkegaard’s Christocentric hamartiology, this understanding of the mystery of sin in light of the even deeper mystery of redemption through Christ, leads Kierkegaard to ‘play’ with the very old and odd idea that sin, as viewed through the eyes of faith and as witnessing to the ‘so much more’ of the Gospel, can be seen as necessary or even fortunate.64 Since perhaps the fifth century, on the Eve before Easter, Roman Catholic deacons have sung these lines, sometimes attributed to Augustine: ‘O’ truly necessary sin of Adam, which is cancelled by Christ’s death! O’ fortunate crime (or “happy fault”) which merited such and so great a redeemer!’65 Gary Anderson underscores just how unexpected and strange is this ‘felix culpa’ or ‘fortunate Fall’ proclamation. ‘But their strangeness,’ he writes, ‘reveals the central mystery of Easter: the human capacity for rebellion has not led to eternal condemnation but to the miracle of God’s loving and steadfast mercy.’66 Of course, The Sickness unto Death as a whole would seem anything but a celebration of the ‘fortune’ of sin. Despair (Fortvivlelse) is the spiritual sickness named in the book’s title. The first half of the text catalogues the increasingly self-conscious forms of despair; the second announces that ‘despair is sin’ and continues to discuss it ‘theologically’,67

58 59 60 61 62 63 64

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PF, 13. PF, 15. SUD, 100. My emphasis. SUD, 77, 14. SUD, 82. SUD, 8, 95. Jason A. Mahn, Fortunate Fallibility: Kierkegaard and the Power of Sin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). The Sacramentary: Approved for Use in the Dioceses of the United States of America by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and Confirmed by the Apostolic See (New York: Catholic Publishing, 1974), 174–8. Gary A. Anderson, ‘Necessarium Adae Peccatum: The Problem and Original Sin’, in Sin, Death and the Devil, ed. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 22–44 [37]. Compare Dale Allison, The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin through Easter Eyes (New York: Crossroad Herder, 1998). SUD, 79.

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that is, as an illness ‘before God’. This spiritual sickness is unknown to ‘thousands and thousands and millions’68 who have it, and it is worse than anything they have experienced. It is ‘unto death’, perpetually so, and Anti-Climacus does not fail to describe it in the most apocalyptic terms: its ‘impotent self-consuming’, the way it ‘nails’ or ‘binds’ a person to him- or herself, how this ‘appalling danger’ rages in individuals with demonic hatred or slowly corrodes entire populations.69 Rather than leading to grace, or as ‘necessitating’ redemption (as the fifth-century Easter proclamation suggests), sin and the consciousness of sin seem to lead only to further and greater sin, according to Anti-Climacus. Indeed, the book as a whole is something of a Teufelskreis – a vicious devil’s circle. Part I of Sickness begins by describing the philistine who has ‘imprisoned himself ’.70 After the protagonist has become progressively conscious of his despair, but incapable of humbling himself under it, Anti-Climacus also uses the image of ‘inclosing reserve’ or ‘shut-in-ness’ (Indesluttethed) to describe one who binds oneself, together with one’s pain, from every external relation.71 Unwilling to be helped, the final defiant despairer prohibits all access to himself or herself by jamming the lock of self-imprisonment.72 The initial philistine and the ending demoniac are, in polar opposite and mirroring ways, ‘secure in the power of despair’ with their worldly confinement and their inward ‘jammed locks’.73 Anti-Climacus thus describes the myriad ways in which sin breeds further sin and how the consciousness of sin almost ineluctably leads one deeper into sinful self-bondage. Every possible way out of sin seems to lead one further into it. And yet, and at the same time, Anti-Climacus also sees in this labyrinth of despair a ‘thoroughfare to faith’.74 Crystal clear about the devastation of sin, Anti-Climacus also frames the entire book with a question that, it seems, would hardly need to be asked: ‘Is despair an excellence or a defect?’75 Strangely, the ‘excellence’ of despair is supported by passages in The Sickness unto Death where he asserts that ‘it is the worst misfortune never to have had that sickness: it is truly a godsend to get it, even if it is the most dangerous of illnesses, if one does not want to be cured of it’.76 Whatever deterioration of wellbeing the sickness of sin might unleash, there is some sort of ‘effective’ or ‘radical’ despair, without which the spirit cannot ‘break through from the ground upward’.77 ‘Spiritless’ persons who are unaware of their despair comprise the foil next to which ‘radical’ despair appears ‘dialectically closer’78 to spiritual health. The regression into intensified sin, Anti-Climacus suggests, may be more valuable than the cloistered life that never meets the possibility of sin – the life that is ‘too spiritless to be called sin’.79 Throughout the book, Anti-Climacus closely juxtaposes suggestions about the possibility of despair’s advantages with assertions about its more obvious destructiveness. He finally and paradoxically concedes that the intensification of sin ‘in a certain sense . . . is very close to the truth; and just because it

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

SUD, 23. SUD, 28, 21, 9. SUD, 42 SUD, 63–7. SUD, 72. SUD, 44, 72. SUD, 67. SUD, 14. SUD, 26. SUD, 59. SUD, 26. SUD, 101.

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lies close to the truth, it is infinitely far away’.80 In some ways, then, intensified despair and demonic sin seem ‘closer’ to the experience of salvation than is a presumed innocence that knows neither sin nor grace. Yet this closeness or proximity must always be ‘dialectical’ for Kierkegaard; sin can never provide a stable middle stage or sure passage between innocence and redemption.81 It is exactly here that Kierkegaard is also both very close and yet far away from nearly every other Christological hamartiology and other articulations of felix culpa, or a fortunate Fall. On the one hand, Kierkegaard understands the nature of sin first and foremost through its elimination in the atonement no less than Paul, Augustine or the Easter Eve worshippers who proclaim that sin is necessary and fortunate in the retrospective light of redemption. On the other hand, Kierkegaard relentlessly diagnoses all the ways that the very excess – the ‘far too much’ – of the incarnation and of atonement introduce the possibility that the sinner will be offended, will despair over the forgiveness of sin.82 In short, the forgiveness and elimination of sin, when understood from the sinner’s own subjectivity, always introduces the possibility of offence and often leads to the continuation and intensification of sin. Kierkegaard’s departure from other Augustinians is largely due to his focus on the lived subjectivities or existential realities of would-be Christians over-and-against a kind of doctrinal theology that is primarily concerned with disambiguating discrete stages and stable concepts. While it makes perfect sense to speak of a sacred history (Heilsgeschichte) that begins with innocence, where prelapsarian individuals are free to sin or not sin (posse peccare, posse non peccare); that continues through postlapsarian bondage, where they are not free not to sin (non posse non peccare); and that culminates in the ‘third stage’ of graced life where they are again able not to sin (posse non peccare) and then finally (at least for the saints) not able to sin (non posse peccare),83 for Kierkegaard, the possibility of sin is not something that modal categories and distinctions between pre- and postlapsarian individuals could track. Sacred history must be more individual, recursive and paradoxical; ‘if it be true, [it] must be fabula, quae de me narrator – a story that narrates me.’84 If anything, then, for Kierkegaard the final ‘stage’ of encountering Christ and his offer of forgiveness and healing deepens, rather than eradicates, an individual’s ability to sin. Rather than speaking of non posse peccare (the impossibility of sin), Kierkegaard might characterize Christian existence as posse peccare potentissime – the possibility of sin potentiated by Christ to the highest power.85 Climacus attributes this drama of salvation to the paradox of Christianity itself: ‘But this in turn is the sharpened pathos – namely, continually to have a possibility that, if it is actualized, is a fall as much deeper as faith is

80 81

SUD, 67. Compare this similar negotiation by Haufniensis: Innocence is not a perfection that one should wish to regain, for as soon as one wishes for it, it is lost, and then it is a new guilt to waste one’s time on wishes. Innocence is not an imperfection in which one cannot remain, for it is always sufficient unto itself, and he who has lost it, that is, not in a manner in which it might have pleased him to have lost it but in the only way in which it can be lost, that is, by guilt – to him it could never occur to boast of his perfection at the expense of innocence. CA, 37.

82 83

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SUD, 84–5, 113–24. Augustine, ‘Admonition and Grace’. In Christian Instruction; Admonition and Grace; The Christian Combat; Faith, Hope and Charity. The Fathers of the Church, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1947), 239–306. SKP V B 53:13, as cited in CA, 186. Mahn, Fortunate Fallibility, 134–8.

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higher than all the religiousness of immanence.’86 Anti-Climacus attributes it to the nature and work of Christ himself. It is Christ who must become the very ‘sign of offense’ in order also to be the ‘object of faith’. It is Christ who necessitates that an ‘infinite fear of offense’ must accompany the ‘infinite passion’ of faith in him.87

CONCLUSION Karl Barth, having earlier drawn on Kierkegaard’s ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between God and humanity and the theological mysteries and existential crises that that difference creates, later distances himself from the melancholic Dane for being so existential and so morose. He critiques Kierkegaard for having ‘failed to express clearly that the gospel is the joyous message of God’s YES to man’.88 In this chapter, I have tried to trace how Kierkegaard does in fact concentrate on sin, perhaps refusing to separate God’s ‘yes’ to humankind from the ‘no’ that humankind might distortedly and sinfully make of it. In remythologizing the story of the Fall as every person’s drama, Kierkegaard certainly reconnects personal freedom and responsibility to all the ways that our lives continue to be bound and fated – ambiguous through and through. Even as Kierkegaard ‘reads’ sin through the person and work of Christ, he sees its distortions magnified through the excessive love of Christ, the very possibility of offence. In these and other ways, Kierkegaard will neither explore sin except through the good news of Jesus, nor will he objectively depict the Gospel apart from humanity’s subjective proclivities to reject it. In all this, he wants grace to be as wondrous and inhabitable as sin is paradoxical and terminal – perpetually ‘unto death’. In none of this is he further from the Gospel than those who speak less of sin. ‘The question’, for Kierkegaard, ‘is whether one has not become joyful in the wrong place; and where is the right place? It is – in danger. To be joyful out on 70,000 fathoms of water, many, many miles from human help – yes, that is something great!’89

FURTHER READING Barrett, Lee C. ‘Kierkegaard’s Anxiety and the Augustinian Doctrine of Original Sin’. In International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept of Anxiety, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 35–61. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985. Ricoeur, Paul. ‘Original Sin: A Study in Meaning’. In The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, translated by Peter McCormick, 269–86. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974. Rumble, Vanessa. ‘The Oracle’s Ambiguity: Freedom and Original Sin in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety’. Soundings 75, no. 4 (1992): 605–25. Sponheim, Paul R. Existing Before God: Søren Kierkegaard and the Human Venture. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017. Taylor, Barbara Brown. Speaking of Sin: The Lost Language of Salvation. Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 2000.

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CUP, 585. PC, 94, 98–9, 105, 111. Karl Barth, ‘Mein Verhältnis zu Søren Kierkegaard’, Orbis Litterarum (1963): 97–100 [99], as cited by Sponheim, Existing Before God, 96. SLW, 470. My emphasis.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Revelation: What Forms of Authority, and to Whom? TOMAS BOKEDAL

INTRODUCTION Adler’s Revelatory Claim and the Centrality of Revelation A footnote in Concluding Unscientific Postscript places revelation among the central concerns of Kierkegaard’s corpus: ‘Revelation is marked by mystery, eternal happiness [Salighed] by suffering, the certitude of faith by uncertainty, easiness by difficulty, truth by absurdity; if this is not maintained, then the esthetic and the religious merge in common confusion.’1 The concept of revelation2 became of particular interest for Kierkegaard already from the early months of his mature authorship.3 In the summer of 1843 an acquaintance and former schoolmate of his, the Hegelian theologian Magister Adolph Peter Adler (1812–1869),4 travelled from the Danish island of Bornholm – where he was serving as a parish priest – to visit Kierkegaard in his apartment in Copenhagen. The two spent several hours together and, during their meeting, Adler handed over a copy of his newly written volume, entitled Nogle Prædikener (‘Some sermons’). In this work, he presented an extraordinary claim of having received a direct verbal revelation from Jesus Christ about eternal life, sin, the evil spirit and the Bible.5 After he had read aloud 1 2

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CUP, 432n*. I want to thank Roy Wiklander, Lund University, for kindly discussing and commenting on earlier drafts of this chapter. I am also grateful for initial conversations with C. Stephen Evans and Murray Rae, and for helpful advice from the editors of the present volume, David Gouwens and Aaron Edwards. Either/Or, which marks the beginning of what Kierkegaard considered to be his authorship proper, was published on 20 February 1843. In a note from 1847, Kierkegaard writes that the concept of authority as it relates to revelation has occupied him from the spring of 1843 (from the publication of Two Upbuilding Discourses, published on 16 May 1843) up to the present (BA, 311–12; BA, 180n). See also Christopher A. P. Nelson, ‘Revelation and the Revealed: The Crux of the Ethical-Religious Stadium’, International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Book on Adler, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008), 75n15. Kierkegaard and Adler had attended the same classes at the Borgerdyd School in Copenhagen for a number of years and also had other things in common as they were both from Copenhagen, sons of well-to-do businessmen, having both submitted their philosophy Magister dissertations in 1841 (corresponding to a PhD) at the University of Copenhagen. Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 440–1. From the preface of Adler’s book we read: One evening I had just given an account of the origin of evil; then I perceived as if in a flash that everything depended not upon thought but upon spirit, and that there existed an evil spirit. That same night a hideous sound descended into our room. Then the Savior commanded me to get up and go in and write

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a significant portion of his work to Kierkegaard, some of it in his ordinary voice and other parts in a strange whisper, Kierkegaard responded rather disapprovingly to Adler’s claim by telling him that he could not, indeed, find any new revelation in his work.6 Adler, in turn, then suggested that he could ‘come again that same evening and read in this voice [the whisper], and then you shall see, it will become clear to you’.7 Apparently Kierkegaard was quite amused by this conviction of Adler’s ‘that the variation in his voice could give the writings greater significance’.8 In a letter written to his brother Peter Christian (29 June 1843) Kierkegaard mentions Magister Adler’s visit, stating that this might be ‘a phenomenon worth keeping an eye on’.9 In line with his alleged revelation, the Hegelian Magister claimed in the preface of Some Sermons that Jesus had told him to eradicate the Hegelian influence from his theology, burn his own (presumably Hegelian) writings and in the future stick to the Bible.10 As things turned out, however, his revelatory claim was soon received negatively by his Lutheran Church superiors. As a result, Adler was suspended and removed from his pastorate. Finally, in August 1845, he was defrocked and dismissed with a pension by the Danish Church, as he was unwilling to recant – though, in the end, it appears that he did not stand ‘unshakably firm by his assertion’.11 The Church also noted, as a form of supplemental explanation (even if not formally part of their charge), that others in the Adler family had been diagnosed with mental instability.12 The dramatic series of events outlined above did not hinder Adler from continuing his literary endeavour, and in June 1846 he published four additional volumes. On the very day of publication, Kierkegaard purchased all of these and began writing a response, addressing the question of divine authority and revelation. His working title was The Book on Adler (Bogen om Adler),13 which he finalized within only a few months; the 337-page manuscript was finished by 1 January 1847. Kierkegaard continued to rewrite it several times over the next few years, all the way up to the spring of 1855.14 The Book on Adler as a whole was only published posthumously in 1871. A central portion of the work, however, appeared in print in May 1849 as the second of the essays in Two EthicalReligious Essays, a publication on which Kierkegaard remarked, This little book is very significant. It contains the key to the greatest potentiality of all my writing, but not the one at which I have been aiming.15 And the second essay down these words: ‘The first human beings could have had an eternal life’ . . . Then Jesus commanded me to burn my own works and in the future to keep to the Bible. BA, 339–40. 6 7 8 9 10

11 12

13

14 15

See notes 31–3 below. As retold by Hans Brøchner; Garff, Kierkegaard, 442. Ibid. LD, 156; BA, 213; Garff, Kierkegaard, 440. See note 5 above. Kierkegaard comments, ‘[D]eceived by his striking outer decision, he [Adler] has achieved the result that in self-deception it is concealed from him that he continues to be a Hegelian.’ BA, 102. BA, 80, 62–3. Garff, Kierkegaard, 443; BA, 78. Adler’s younger brother, for example, had been diagnosed as schizophrenic. For an assessment of Adler’s claims as ‘pathological’, see reference in Nelson, ‘Revelation’, 76. For alternative titles, see, e.g., JP 6:6229, p. 40 / SKS 21, NB6:64, p. 47; and JP 6:6325, p. 106 / SKS 21, NB9:74, p. 245. BA, x–ix, 334, 363n57; Garff, Kierkegaard, 446. The focus of these essays is on apostolic authority. See Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 331–9. In Kierkegaard’s view, authority is a specific quality either of an apostolic calling or of ordination; accordingly, as he himself insists: ‘yes, how often I have repeated this, to me so important and crucial, my first statement about myself – “without authority.” ’ BA, 236. Similarly, his Upbuilding Discourses ‘are not sermons, because the author does not have authority to preach’. BA, 180.

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contains the most important of all the ethical-religious concepts, the one I have deliberately omitted until its appearance there.16 Kierkegaard is here referring to ‘The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle’, which discusses the ethical-religious concept of authority, namely the qualitatively different authority between that of a genius, which is located within the sphere of immanence,17 and that of an apostle, which is defined within the sphere of transcendence.18 Interestingly, for Kierkegaard ‘the category of apostle is precisely the divine authority’.19 In light of the paradoxical-religious authority given to an apostle by divine appointment, all other forms of authority, such as the profundity of the genius, are regarded as, at most, evanescent: ‘In the sphere of immanence, authority is utterly unthinkable, or it can be thought only as transitory.’20 In somewhat broader terms, ‘The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle’ presents the discrepancy between authoritative and nonauthoritative discourse in the following wording: ‘When someone who has the authority to say it says to a person, “Go!” and when someone who does not have the authority says, “Go!” the utterance (Go!) and its content are indeed identical; evaluated esthetically, it is, if you like, equally well spoken, but the authority makes the difference.’21 Again, effectively Kierkegaard is indicating that the revealed truth that is brought to human beings externally, by divine authority, is ‘the most important of all the ethical-religious concepts’ in his writings.22 However, similarly to the intended function of The Point of View for My Work as an Author (written in 1848),23 he notes in his journals that Two EthicalReligious Essays, addressing the notion of authority, does not belong to his authorship proper. It is instead a comment and point of view on the authorship as a whole, defining its boundary, ‘like a navigation mark by which one steers but . . . in such a way that the pilot understands precisely that he is to keep a certain distance from it’.24 Nevertheless, as has been noted above, authority is still presented not only as the most important of all the ethical-religious concepts in Kierkegaard’s writings, but also as the most important quality of revelation. The discussion in the present chapter takes its point of departure from the Danish nouns for ‘revelation’, Aabenbaring (‘Open-baring’ or ‘baring-open’), Aabenbarelse, and the verb for ‘reveal’, aabenbare (from the Old Danish openbaræ, borrowed from Medieval Low German openbaren) – the lexical meaning of which is to bring to light or to make known;25 and in the technical sense by which Kierkegaard uses the word: to bring to light, to make known by means of divine authority. Most importantly, as something which comes from beyond, ‘[r]evelation is neither assessable within human categories of understanding

16

17

18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Quoted from BA, vii (cf. 311 and 27). See also note 24, below. Two Ethical-Religious Essays was authored under the pseudonym H. H. Truth as immanent in the Socratic–Platonic sense means that it is located within the individual and can be discovered by recollection (via the mediation of a teacher). Truth as transcendent implies that it is located external to the individual and thus must be revealed by the ultimate teacher, God. BA, 32. BA, 180. BA, 179. BA, vii. Posthumously published in 1859. BA, viii; OMWA, 6n; Stephen Backhouse, Kierkegaard: A Single Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 248. Sean Anthony Turchin, ‘Revelation’, in Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome V: Objectivity to Sacrifice, ed. Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15: tome V (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 239.

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nor predictable through human imagination. It is God’s free self-disclosure, the unveiling of an eternal, transcendent truth which otherwise remains hidden from us.’26 Beyond the more narrowly defined scope of this vocabulary I shall attend to a concept of revelation in Kierkegaard that addresses God’s unveiling of himself and related divine–human communication also in broader terms, including the notions of ‘general revelation’ (to everyone) and personally experienced divine governance (to the individual). I will only marginally address, however, the distinction between God’s self-revelation and revelation vis-à-vis the human self (ethical disclosure). My focus will be on the former.27 I shall begin by briefly elaborating on the three related concepts of truth, revelation and authority in Kierkegaard’s corpus (I), followed by discussions of the necessity of revelation for knowledge of God (II), historical revelation in the God-man and Scripture (III), generic knowledge of God via general revelation (IV) and the important aspect of appropriation (faith) in Kierkegaard’s works (V). This, then, leads on to a section on experiential aspects of revelation pertaining to the individual, especially with a view to Kierkegaard’s own life, even from an early age – with particular focus on the role he ascribed to divine governance (VI). In the final section (VII), some concluding remarks are made concerning our two major questions: What forms of authority, and to whom?

I. THE TRIAD: TRUTH, REVELATION, AUTHORITY Immanent Recollected and Transcendent Revealed Truth The mutually related concepts of truth (Sandhed), revelation (Aabenbaring, Aabenbarelse) and authority (Myndighed, Autoritet) are at the heart of vital portions of Kierkegaard’s literary production. The centrality of these concepts can be seen in key pseudonymous works such as Philosophical Fragments, which stresses the difference and necessary distinction between immanent recollected and transcendent revealed truth. Another example is found in a journal entry from 1848,28 which reads, ‘From the Christian point of view truth does not reside in the subject but is a revelation which must be proclaimed.’29 Furthermore, in The Book on Adler Kierkegaard directly connects the concepts of revelation and authority: ‘The person who is called by a revelation is specifically called to appeal to his revelation; he must indeed use authority by virtue of being called by a revelation . . . It is the very revelation-fact that is decisive; it is this that gives him divine authority.’30 However, it was at precisely this point that Magister Adler had failed, as he did not stand firm by his original claim, nor did he act consistently according to it.31 Indeed, by making additional appeals in subsequent publications

26 27

28

29 30

31

Steven M. Emmanuel, Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 37. See notes 105 and 118; and Section VI below. On the distinction and connection between God’s self-revelation and ethical disclosure, see Nelson, ‘Revelation’. On 1848 as Kierkegaard’s most productive year, see JP 6:6356, p. 125 / SKS 21, NB10:60, p. 290; Roy Wiklander, ‘Kierkegaard och den indirekta meddelelsen’, in Tänkarens mångfald: Nutida Perspektiv på Søren Kierkegaard, ed. Lone Koldtoft, Jon Stewart and Jan Holmgaard (Lund: Centrum för Danmarksstudier, Lund University, 2005), 130–212 [138]. JP 2:1957, p. 383, modified / SKS 21, NB6:68, p. 50. BA, 32. For a brief overview of the significance of the notion of authority throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship, see BA, vii–x. Cf. C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 241–3. BA, 62–3, 80. Nelson, ‘Revelation’, 79.

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to himself as a kind of ‘genius’, he thus referred to an instance beyond the revelation itself.32 Furthermore, by Hegelian colouring, he did not ‘hold firmly to the Christian concept of a revelation’.33 Some three years after meeting with Adler in his home in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard had thus decided to regard the gifted Magister simply as ‘a private, confused lyrical genius’, who probably had been in such a state all along, and in that case now only needed ‘to revoke his first statement about having had a revelation’.34 For, seen from the viewpoint of the paradoxical-religious (pertaining to aspects of the religious that appear contrary to plain belief), the qualitative difference between an apostle with divine authority to command and a genius is, ‘The genius is without authority.’35

The Primacy of Authority in Revelation To illuminate the ‘eternal essential qualitative difference’36 between a divinely authoritative apostolic word (here conveyed by Christ, the New Testament, and the voice of the pastor) and the reasoning of a genius (here represented by Plato), Kierkegaard uses the following illustration, addressing the question of immortality: A Christian pastor, if he is to speak properly, must quite simply say, ‘We have Christ’s word that there is an eternal life, and with that the matter is decided. Here it is a matter neither of racking one’s brains nor of speculating, but of its being Christ who, not in the capacity of profundity but with his divine authority, has said it.’ . . . On the other hand, let us take someone who wants to rack his brains profoundly on the question of immortality – will he not be justified in denying that the direct statement is a profound answer to the question? What Plato says about immortality is actually profound, attained by profound cogitating; but then poor Plato does not have any authority.37 To underscore, as strongly as possible, the primacy of authority when elaborating on divine revelation – second not even to the content of the revelation38 – Kierkegaard remarks, ‘If I imagined a letter from heaven, then it is not the content of the letter, no matter from whom it came, that is the main point. The main point is that it is a letter from heaven.’39 Thus, according to Kierkegaard, the primary thing to notice in relation to an

32

33 34

35

36

37 38 39

BA, 81–7. Cf. BA, 186: ‘An apostle has no other evidence than his own statement, and at most his willingness to suffer everything joyfully for the sake of that statement.’ Cf. Joe R. Jones, ‘Some Remarks on Authority and Revelation in Kierkegaard’, Journal of Religion 57, no. 3 (1977): 232–51 [233]. BA, 121. Cf. Nelson, ‘Revelation’, 74–82. BA, 81–2, 85; cf. 188. Adler’s revelation report (see note 5 above) bears a certain similarity to a contemporary revelatory account of the Hegelian Johan Ludvig Heiberg. See Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard and His Contemporaries: The Culture of Golden Age Denmark, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series 10. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 113–14. OMWA, 6n; BA, 188; BA, 177: ‘A genius is evaluated purely esthetically . . . an apostle is what he is by having divine authority. The divine authority is what is qualitatively decisive. It is not by evaluating the content of the doctrine esthetically or philosophically that I will or can arrive at the conclusion.’ BA, 181. For the absolute difference between the human and the divine, see further PF, 44–7; cf. also CUP, 412–13, 492; SUD, 99, 117, 121–2, 126–7; Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 135–6. BA 184; cf. 181. See note 35 above. BA, 32.

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imagined, or non-imagined, authentic revelatory claim is the revelation-fact as such, that the form of authority is heavenly, of the highest order.40

II. THE NECESSITY OF REVELATION FOR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD The Limits of Universal Reason for Understanding Christian Faith In his characteristic ironical style, Kierkegaard presents Adler’s entrance into Hegelianism as follows: ‘With enthusiasm for philosophy’s hero, gladly following the motto: “You lack everything; study Hegel and you have everything,” enchanted by the hope of gaining everything . . . he begins his study.’41 Now, even after Adler’s alleged revelation, and the command to burn his Hegelian works, Kierkegaard is of the view that the Magister continues to be a Hegelian, though a self-deceived one, from whom his own true identity is concealed.42 Like Spinoza, Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers, Hegel and his followers emphasized the primacy of reason in accessing ‘truth’. However, as already indicated (I), Kierkegaard rejected this prevailing philosophical approach.43 His pseudonym Johannes Climacus deals directly with epistemological limitations inherent in Hegelianism, especially in its Christian right-wing form, placing it within the broad Western philosophical tradition with its roots in Platonism. Accordingly, in Philosophical Fragments Climacus undertakes an interesting thoughtexperiment in order to present two fundamentally different existence possibilities, engaging the Socratic question, ‘Can the truth be learned?’44 On the one hand, philosophy, represented by Socrates and, on the other, Christian theology. They both engage the question of what Climacus in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’ calls ‘essential knowing’,45 focusing on the religious and ethical understanding expected from a person in order to be a ‘true’ or genuine human being.46 Merold Westphal phrases it well: It is that understanding of self (Who am I?) in relation to ‘whatever is ultimate, absolute, infinite and eternal that is the common quest of theology and the great traditions of philosophy’.47 By framing his thought-project in terms of a Socratic–Platonic understanding of the ethical-religious truth,48 Climacus wishes to show that the core of the Western philosophical tradition from Plato (427–347 BCE) to Hegel (AD 1770–1831) is fundamentally

40

41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48

In C. Stephen Evans’s wording, ‘It is a distinguishing mark of a genuine revelation that it “did not arise in any human heart”; a revelation represents a break with all “immanent” human thinking . . . The key element in a revelation is authority.’ C. Stephen Evans, Faith beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 88. Cf. Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 105–6; and BA, 186. BA, 93. BA, 102. Peter Vardy, The SPCK Introduction to Kierkegaard (London: SPCK, 1996, 2008), 9. PF, 9; David R. Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 159–60. CUP, 197–8; Westphal, Concept, 125. Robert C. Roberts, Faith, Reason, and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard's 'Philosophical Fragments' (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 17. Westphal, Concept, 125–6. Cf. Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987), 109.

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incompatible with Christianity and that philosophy and Christianity therefore must belong in two distinct and separate spheres,49 the sphere of immanence (the truth is already within the human being) and that of transcendence (the truth needs to be brought to man from the outside). As David Law points out, Hegel, like his Platonist predecessors, understands truth to be immanent within a human being; however, the great nineteenthcentury philosopher moves a step beyond his predecessors as he conceives of ‘the whole of human history as the fuller unfolding and development of this truth’.50 Not surprisingly, Kierkegaard and his pseudonym Climacus view these Socratic-Hegelian philosophical projects, marked by the presuppositions of immanence, as pagan, whether or not they are pursued under Christian insignia.51 From this immanent-rationalistic philosophical vantage point, however, we note with Law also the following cautioning: [If it is assumed that] truth is immanent in humankind and in human history then the events of Christianity are merely stages in the process of the development of the truth. Notions such as revelation, incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, atonement, reconciliation, and so on, are not unique and decisive events, but are merely part of the flux of human history and the unfolding of the truth. They too must be left behind as the world-historical process continues.52 Under the auspices of immanence, the very essence of Christianity here appears threatened and, indeed, risks being swallowed up as being nothing more than a transitory moment in the world-historical process.53 It is thus necessary, Law underscores, to demonstrate that the Christian concept of truth is categorically different from that of Hegelianism–Platonism, with enough independent and revelatory force to withstand the rationalistic claims.54 Christian notions such as incarnation, crucifixion, atonement and, not least, sin, and their significance, are instead dependent on revelation in order to be communicated to human beings. With reference to Johannes Climacus’s argumentation in Postscript, C. Stephen Evans in his 1983 commentary on Climacus’s two major works takes this point even further when he discusses the Hegelian theologians, who claimed to be Christian and at the same time thought they had made an advance on pagan thought.55 Climacus remarks, ‘That someone prefers paganism to Christianity is not at all confusing, but to make paganism out to be the highest within Christianity is an injustice, both to Christianity which becomes something different from what it is, and to paganism which becomes nothing whatever, although it was indeed something.’56 Evans here notes that Climacus’ attack, if justified, applies not only to Hegelianism, but to a tremendous amount of classical liberal theology and even to a great deal of theology today. For the Hegelians were certainly not the only ones to deny Jesus’ divinity and to transform 49

50 51

52 53 54 55 56

C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s ‘Fragments’ and ‘Postscript’: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983), 26; Law, Christology, 155. Law, Christology, 155. CUP, 368; Evans, Fragments, 26: ‘On the Hegelian account Jesus could not be God in any unique sense and does not represent a transcendent revelation’; Law, Christology, 161. Law, Christology, 156; cf. PF, 13. Law, Christology, 156. Ibid. Evans, Fragments, 26. CUP, 361.

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Christianity into either a speculative doctrine or moral teaching (or both) whose truth can be recognized through mankind’s immanent moral and religious consciousness. Such a view, which obviates an authoritative revelation or transcendent acts by God in history, is widely prevalent even today.57

Contrasting Socratic Reason with Faith As part of his twofold thought experiment in Philosophical Fragments, Climacus undertakes the task of contrasting reason (immanence)58 with faith (transcendence).59 The discussion, as we have seen, boils down to a question of recollection (the autonomy of the knower, who possesses the truth and is thus not dependent on any external authority)60 and revelation (divine authority).61 According to the first half of Climacus’s thought-project – the Socratic recollection scheme – the truth, or access to truth, is not introduced to us but is innately already within us.62 Since any point of departure in time is as such something accidental, this applies also to the Socratic teacher, who is merely ‘a vanishing point, an occasion’.63 In fact, the teacher is in one sense not a real teacher but rather a form of facilitator who helps the learners to remember or (re)discover the truth they already possess, but in relation to which their consciousness has been shrouded. The teacher thus serves as a form of ‘midwife’ who does not him- or herself give birth.64 Furthermore, a particular teacher, such as Socrates,65 is never indispensable, nor is the particular moment at which understanding takes place in itself significant, since the recollection of knowledge can occur at any moment. By contrast, the second half of Climacus’s thought-experiment portrays quite the opposite situation to this Socratic schema, taking its point of departure in the moment (Øieblikket), ‘the decisive time of the teacher’s historical appearance’.66 Climacus continues, Now, if the moment is to acquire decisive significance, then the seeker up until that moment must not have possessed the truth, not even in the form of ignorance, for in that case the moment becomes merely the moment of occasion; indeed, he must not

57

Evans, Fragments, 26. See also Westphal, Concept, 21: The phrase ‘religion within the boundaries of mere reason’ is not just the title of a book by Kant; it describes the central theme or task of Enlightenment philosophy of religion. The most powerful seventeenth-century version is Spinoza’s; the most powerful eighteenth-century version is Kant’s; and the most powerful nineteenth-century version is Hegel’s. It is worth noting that each of these three is deeply incompatible with the other two.

58 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66

PF, 11, 38, 62. PF, xv, 61–2. PF, 62. Westphal, Concept, 124. PF, 9: The reason Climacus, following Socrates (Meno 80e), opts for ‘recollection’ as the key to knowledge about ‘truth’ in the first Socratic part of his thought experiment is grounded in the following dilemma from the opening pages of Philosophical Fragments: ‘a person cannot possibly seek what he knows, and just as impossibly, he cannot seek what he does not know, for what he knows he cannot seek, since he knows it, and what he does not know he cannot seek, because, after all, he does not even know what he is supposed to seek.’ Law, Christology, 163. PF, 11. Law, Christology, 163–4. PF, 12. PF, 13.

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even be a seeker. This is the way we have to state the difficulty if we do not want to explain it Socratically. Consequently, he has to be defined as being outside the truth (not coming toward it like a proselyte, but going away from it) or as untruth. He is, then, untruth.67 In order to come to grips with this new situation in Climacus’s experiment, revelation is needed to break through the barrier of apparent Socratic self-sufficiency; most importantly, it is now revealed that the human being is turned away from truth in sin. Instead of the truth being situated within the individual, it now necessarily comes through a particular teacher at a decisive point in time; in this situation the learner has no capacity for the truth and thus is no longer him- or herself bearer of the ‘truth’ but rather ‘untruth’, which is defined as sin vis-à-vis ‘the god’.68 Instead of innate reason, faith (beyond reason) attains the central place.69 A new set of assumptions, as an alternative to the Socratic position, is thus brought in, as summarized by Climacus: ‘a new organ has been assumed here: faith; and a new presupposition: the consciousness of sin; and a new decision: the moment; and a new teacher: the god in time.’70 Again, if the moment in time, which Climacus later names ‘the fullness of time’,71 is to acquire significance, ‘then the seeker up until that moment must not have possessed the truth’.72 And [i]f the teacher is to be the occasion that reminds the learner, he cannot assist him to recollect that he actually does know the truth, for the learner is indeed untruth. That for which the teacher can become the occasion of his recollecting is that he is untruth. But by this calling to mind, the learner is definitely excluded from the truth.73 As the teacher thus cannot be just an occasion for the learner’s recovery of an innately possessed truth, the teacher becomes essential, bringing both the truth and the condition for appropriating it in the moment, which becomes of decisive significance.74 No human being is in a position to give the truth to another human being, we are told; only ‘the god’ can be the teacher. Christian language here seems to have been introduced into Climacus’s discussion. We are reminded of similar phrasing used by the Gospel of Matthew (23.8) and Ignatius’s Letter to the Magnesians (ca. AD 110), which makes reference to the ‘one God who revealed Himself through his Son Jesus Christ . . . our only teacher’.75 The significance of the teacher, who is revealed at a particular moment in history is a leading thought from the first page of Philosophical Fragments. Climacus, following Lessing, asks, ‘Can a historical point of departure be given for an eternal consciousness;

67 68

69

70 71 72 73 74 75

PF, 13. PF, 15, 39. Cf. Ingvar Horgby, ‘Immediacy – Subjectivity – Revelation: An Interpretation of Kierkegaard’s Conception of Reality ’, Inquiry 8 (1965): 84–117 [112–14]. Cf. the treatment of various types of fideism in C. Stephen Evans, Faith beyond Reason: ‘Faith both seeks and enables understanding. Faith enables human beings to move beyond the limitations of finite, fallen human reason’ (153). Although, as Climacus points out, ‘faith [fides qua creditur] is not a knowledge’, it is still the case that faith can be rationally reflected on. Cf. Evans, Fragments, 210–12. PF, 111. PF, 18; cf. Gal. 4.4. PF, 13. PF, 14. PF, 28. Magn. 8.2; 9.1; cf. Jn 1.1, 14.

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how can such a point of departure be of more than historical interest; can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?’ In a journal note from 1842–3, written while he was working on Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard seems to suggest an answer: ‘In Christianity it is precisely the historical which is the essential.’ It is this reality, he explains, that distinguishes Christianity from ‘other ideas’.76 Murray Rae comments in this connection on the contingent character of Christian faith: ‘Christianity rests its claim to truth upon something that has happened in history and might have been otherwise.’77 Now, what took place happened at a unique juncture – in the history of Israel, culminating in Jesus of Nazareth, the God-man, and as documented in Scripture.

III. REVELATION IN HISTORY: THE GOD-MAN AND SCRIPTURE The God-Man and the Moment In an almost breathtaking piece of phrasing, the pseudonym in The Concept of Anxiety, Vigilius Haufniensis, tells us that ‘the moment is that ambiguity when time and eternity touch each other’.78 For Johannes Climacus, one aspect of the moment, as the intersection of time and eternity, refers to ‘the fullness of time’, that is, to ‘the time of the teacher’s historical appearance’.79 Or in more explicit Christian language: ‘Jesus of Nazareth is in person the intersection of eternity and time.’80 In a famous passage Kierkegaard–Climacus thus presents the historical kernel of Christianity in the confession that ‘in such and such a year the god appeared in the humble form of a servant, lived and taught among us, and then died’.81 As Rae underscores, in Kierkegaard’s view, ‘Christianity stands or falls on it being true or not that the god has appeared in time’.82 A second aspect of Kierkegaard’s description of the moment refers to the individual’s participation in the coming together of eternity and time. Kierkegaard speaks of this participation in various ways. In Rae’s phrasing, ‘We may call it faith; we may call it discipleship; we may call it contemporaneity with Christ. But it is through such participation that we become a self and so learn to rest transparently in the power that created us.’83 Now, in order to carry out the necessary transformation of the learner,84 the 'god-man' in Climacus’s account is actually more than a teacher.85 The teacher is also a saviour, who saves the learner from unfreedom,86 a deliverer, delivering the person who had imprisoned him- or herself, and a reconciler, taking away ‘the wrath that lay over the incurred guilt’.87

76

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78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Murray Rae, ‘It is the Historical which is the Essential’, Unpublished paper presented at the Kierkegaard and History session at the 2016 AAR Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX, 1. Cf. CUP, 15. Rae, ‘Historical’, 1; cf. Tomas Bokedal, The Formation and Significance of the Christian Biblical Canon: A Study in Text, Ritual and Interpretation (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2014), 6–8. CA, 89; italics mine. Rae, ‘Historical’, 5. See note 83 below. PF, 13, 18. Rae, ‘Historical’, 5. PF, 104. Rae, ‘Historical’, 1. Ibid., 5; for three distinct meanings of Kierkegaard’s use of the moment, see Roberts, Faith, 17n2. PF, 15. PF, 15–16. PF, 17. PF, 17.

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Although short, temporal and passing, the moment when God is incarnated in the form of a visible human being is nonetheless unique and filled with the eternal.88 We see here what Kierkegaard–Climacus characteristically treats as a paradox. The pivotal event of God taking on human form in time is a paradox in the sense of something which is ‘absolutely different from what human thought can think’.89 This, in turn, is grounded in the absolute difference that exists between human beings and the truth.90 One particularly significant aspect of the moment – the intersection between eternity and time – is that it opens up the possibility of the future as something different from the past (characterized by a humanity in untruth and sin), the possibility of a future in which ‘a new creation might emerge’.91 It is clear from the above that the God-man has prevalence in revelation. However, we need to be aware that the revelation of the God-man is marked by the paradoxical in more than one respect. As ‘the god’ is bound to serve, he appears in the form of a servant as an ‘essential expression of the god’s being, which is love’.92 The ambiguity of the servant form here makes impossible a direct relationship with the god and, in the words of David Law, ‘confronts the contemporary with the choice of faith or offence’.93 In addition to the physical form of ‘the god’s’ appearance, alternative forms in which humans may encounter the divine offer themselves, such as oral reports circulating about the god,94 memories95 and written reports, which provide ‘the form’ of the eternal for those who come after.96 We now turn to the latter of these, the written account.

Scripture and Revelation Though the presence of Christ has primacy in Kierkegaard’s understanding of revelation, Scripture, too, plays a vital role.97 As a traditional Lutheran with Pietist-Moravian leanings, Kierkegaard subscribed to the authority of the Christian Bible (the Protestant canon) as divinely inspired Scripture ‘given by God as an instantiation of and medium for divine revelation’.98 In one of his religious discourses he writes, ‘The importance of Holy Scripture is to be an interpreter of the divine to mankind . . . its claim is to want to teach the believer everything from the beginning.’99 His characteristic paradoxicalreligious approach to the notions of authority and revelation here comes to the fore as he comments on the quality of the language of the New Testament:

88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

98 99

PF, 18. PF, 44–5. Nevertheless, the paradox still presupposes rationality. Without rationality there is no paradox. Wiklander, ‘meddelelsen’, 135. Law, Christology, 167–9. CA, 89. Rae, ‘Historical’, 5. Law, Christology, 187. Ibid., 197. PF, 58. PF, 65. Law, Christology, 197–200. ‘The Holy Scriptures are the highway signs [Veiviseren]: Christ is the way [Veien].’ JP 1:208, p. 84 / SKS 20, NB:161, p. 105. Kyle A. Roberts, ‘Scriptures’, in Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Tome VI: Salvation to Writing, ed. Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15: tome VI (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 9–15 [9]. Roberts, ‘Scriptures’, 9. EUD, 327; Roberts, ‘Scriptures’, 9.

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What holds true of the apostles, who were very simple men of the poorest class (since in this very way their authority was all the more strongly accentuated; they were nothing at all in themselves, not geniuses, not councilmen or state governors, but fishermen – therefore all of their authority was from God), holds true also of the poor Greek [slette Græsk] of the New Testament.100 As Kierkegaard regularly used the Scriptures as a resource for identifying basic features of the faith, his approach to both Scripture and doctrine can be described as rather traditional. Thus, he was not out to change the doctrines taught in the church but, with his distinctive appeal, to insist that something be done with them.101 Along these lines, the principal aim of The Book on Adler was not about Adler as a person but ‘to illuminate the age and to uphold dogmatic concepts’ by means of ‘an ethical inquiry into the concept of revelation’.102 Also when encountering the miraculous, Kierkegaard opts for longhonoured patterns of reading, as a late journal entry highlights: ‘In the New Testament miracle is presented as inseparable from being Christian (Mark 16:17), . . . when there are no longer any miracles Christianity no longer exists at all.’103 Having dwelt a moment on special revelation in the God-man and Scripture, I shall now briefly discuss also what is frequently referred to as ‘natural knowledge of God’ or ‘general revelation’.104

IV. NATURAL KNOWLEDGE OF GOD FOR EVERYONE Although it has been common to regard Kierkegaard as rather critical towards natural theology, for our purposes it is worth noting that he nevertheless holds knowledge of the existence of God as something commonly recognizable among human beings. Yet, in Kierkegaard’s view such knowledge does not in any way legitimize standard proofs for the existence of God.105 Here he mounts his famous criticism pointing out the comical in someone trying to prove God’s existence. The humourist Climacus holds this to be a foolish exercise, like trying to prove the existence of a king when he, in his most majestic presence, is right before one’s eyes: To demonstrate the existence [Tilvær] of someone who exists [er til] is the most shameless assault, since it is an attempt to make him ludicrous, but the trouble is that one does not even suspect this, that in dead seriousness one regards it as a godly undertaking. How could it occur to anyone to demonstrate that he exists unless one has allowed oneself to ignore him; and now one does it in an even more lunatic way by demonstrating his existence right in front of his nose.106

100 101 102 103 104 105

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JP 1:182, p. 73 / SKS 20, NB2:111, pp. 184–5. JP 6:6702, p. 362 / SKS 24, NB22:23, p. 117. BA, 226, 3. Nelson, ‘Revelation’, 78–9. JP 3:2725, p. 202 / SKS 25, NB30:17, p. 395. Cf. note 112 below. See, however, Wolfhart Pannenberg’s interesting comment on Kierkegaard as a representative of a form of anthropological proof of God’s existence (though not in the strict sense) by his definition of the self/spirit as a relation to the infinite that relates one to oneself: ‘it is the function of anthropological proofs to show that the concept of God is an essential part of a proper human self-understanding, whether in relation to human reason or to other basic fulfilments of human existence.’ Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 93. CUP, 545–6; cf. PF, 39–44.

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C. Stephen Evans here offers two clarifying points to account for Kierkegaard– Climacus’s critique of arguments for God’s existence. Kierkegaard is opposed to proofs of God’s existence, first, because they make it appear ‘that there might be some doubt about the matter’, which, according to Kierkegaard, is not the case, and second, because they take one’s gaze ‘away from the factors that make it possible for actual humans to know God’.107 They only focus on a particular kind of rationality that, for the moment, brackets out essential ethical dimensions of the divine–human relationship, including those relating to the passions and the will. Evans further remarks that [o]n Kierkegaard’s view, religious faith has declined among intellectuals, not because they are so smart, but because their imaginations are so weak and their emotional lives are so impoverished. If intellectuals do not believe in God, either it is because they do not want to believe, or else it is because the natural human capacities that ought to allow them to recognize God at work in their lives atrophied and are no longer working properly.108 Kierkegaard even seems to take the argument one step further by holding that unbelief is a motivated unbelief, ‘involving what a Freudian would call repressed knowledge’.109 In Kierkegaard’s view, the one who claims to be an atheist is in fact a person who is unwilling to allow what they know – that God exists – to have power over his or her mind:110 ‘just as no one has ever proved [God’s existence], so has there never been an atheist, even though there certainly have been many who have been unwilling to let what they know (that the god exists) get control of their minds.’111 Before proceeding, we shall mention briefly as well another key aspect of natural knowledge of God, or general revelation,112 namely Kierkegaard’s conviction that at least some moral obligations apply universally and are part of what he calls the ‘universally human’. Significantly, God, in Kierkegaard’s view, has placed love ‘within the ground’ of every human person.113 The knowledge of the love that God commands us to have towards one another is a knowledge that everyone can have and should have: ‘Thus every human being can come to know everything about love, just as every human being can come to know he, like every other human being, is loved by God.’114 Knowledge of the divine command to love one’s neighbour is given both as special revelation and also, most importantly, as something deeply rooted in creation itself.115 Nevertheless, Kierkegaard sees love as a ‘suprahuman relationship, an inconceivable relationship between human beings’; for that reason one human being cannot implant love in another’s heart. ‘It is God, the Creator, who must implant love in each human being, he

107

108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115

C. Stephen Evans, ‘Kierkegaard, Natural Theology, and the Existence of God’, Kierkegaard and Christian Faith, ed. Paul Martens and C. Stephen Evans (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 27. Ibid., 32–3. Ibid., 29. Ibid.; SUD, 125–31. JP 3:3606, p. 662. Evans provides the following handy definition: ‘Very roughly, general revelation is the knowledge of God that God makes possible through observation of the natural world or through reflection on human experiences that are universal or commonly accessible. Special revelation is knowledge of God made possible by specific communications from God or specific historical events.’ C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands & Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 156; cf. 161. Ibid., 160–1; WL, 364, 216. Evans, Ethic of Love, 161; WL, 364. Evans, Ethic of Love, 159–60, 204; also 163, 301.

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who himself is Love.’116 This occurs as a universal call to love the neighbour. However, as Evans stresses, ‘in our sinfulness we humans evade and suppress this call, a condition that requires the revelation of God’s love for us, and God’s demand for love in us, in the Old and New Testaments.’117 Said otherwise, natural knowledge of the divine and the ethical is not equal to corresponding knowledge gained through special revelation, as the former is more vague and also more subject to error.118

V. APPROPRIATING REVELATION: A MYSTERY WHICH MUST BE BELIEVED In Kierkegaard–Climacus’s view, divine revelation is the ‘most certain of all’.119 Because God is God, and thus by definition supremely authoritative, ‘whatever he says is worthy of belief ’.120 Nevertheless, even such supreme epistemological certainty as that provided by a revelation becomes dialectical when the finite, existing individual is to appropriate it.121 Climacus notes that ‘[i]n a human being there is always a desire, at once comfortable and concerned, to have something really firm and fixed that can exclude the dialectical’. But this, we are told, ‘is cowardliness and fraudulence toward the divine’.122 Instead, although revelation as such is always characterized by absolute authority, placed in a privileged position in relation to what we might call the ‘universally human’,123 it is nonetheless always marked by the mysterious, the hidden and by indirect communication. Even knowledge of God gained through nature – although manifest to everyone124 – is mysterious, since God himself is not seen, only his works, and since his very omnipresence is characterized by a certain invisibility. In Climacus’s phrasing, ‘He is in the creation, everywhere in the creation, but he is not there directly, and only when the single individual turns inward into himself (consequently only in the inwardness of self-activity) does he become aware and capable of seeing God.’125 So, all Christian revelation and knowledge of the divine perceived by existing human beings are indirect. Focusing on the narrower question of revelation, Kierkegaard gives expression both to its mysteriousness and the invitation to

116 117 118

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120 121 122 123 124

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WL, 216. Evans, Ethic of Love, 301–2, 204–5. Ibid., 161, 110–11; Evans, Natural Theology, 35–6. The possible place of general revelation and natural knowledge of God in Kierkegaard’s thought touches on some central questions in reading his literature, including how one sees the relation between Kierkegaard’s anthropology and his theology, religiousness A and religiousness B, and nature and grace. Does Kierkegaard’s anthropology function as a kind of natural knowledge of God, a general revelation, that then is completed or augmented by special revelation, so there is a kind of continuity between the human and divine? Or does special revelation mean discontinuity with any alleged or actual natural knowledge of God? For a survey of issues related to these broader questions concerning natural theology and general revelation, see Chapter 9 in this volume by Lee C. Barrett, ‘Kierkegaard’s Theological Legacy’. I thank David Gouwens for pointing me to this wider discussion. CUP, 35. In line with the recurring theme of The Book on Adler, the one who has had a revelation will not wonder whether or not they have had a revelation. See Nelson, ‘Revelation’, 78n25. Jones, ‘Remarks’, 244. CUP, 35. Ibid. Cf. Jones, ‘Remarks’, 242. As for questions pertaining to natural theology, Climacus–Kierkegaard argues that ‘recollection applies’. PF, 192; Evans, ‘Natural Theology’, 26, 35. CUP, 243; cf. 245–6: ‘This relation between omnipresence and invisibility is like the relation between mystery and revelation, that the mystery expresses that the revelation is revelation in the stricter sense, that the mystery is the one and only mark by which it can be known, since otherwise a revelation becomes something like a police officer’s omnipresence.’

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embrace it through faith. As he says in one of his Christian discourses, ‘God’s greatness in nature is manifest [aabenbar], but God’s greatness in showing mercy is a mystery, which must be believed. Precisely because it is not directly manifest [aabenbar] to everyone, precisely for that reason it is, and is called, the revealed [aabenbarede].’126

VI. REVELATORY EXPERIENCES: ILLUSTRATIONS FROM KIERKEGAARD’S LIFE Early Experiences: The Bible, the Self, the God-Relationship, the Christ The young Søren Kierkegaard had a Lutheran Pietistic upbringing, which placed emphasis on the salvation and sanctity of the individual believer. Concerning the type of revelatory experience that might encounter the Kierkegaard family, the Danish biographer Joakim Garff comments that their home ‘was steeped in religious notions typical of humble folk . . . [this] included the belief that a randomly chosen Bible verse could really give one an anything-but-random nod from Divine Governance concerning coming events and pressing obligations’.127 The continuous experience which he considered to be part of his own particular Godrelationship and which, more than any other, followed Søren throughout life he himself described as follows: ‘From childhood on I have been in the grip of an enormous depression, the depth of which finds its only true manifestation in the equally enormous proficiency granted me to hide it under a seeming cheerfulness and zest for life.’128 Similarly to Augustine’s focus on God and the human self, Kierkegaard drew the conclusion from his own melancholy disposition and his artistic gift that the equally great magnitude of his depression and his dissimulative art signified that ‘he was assigned to himself and the God-relationship’.129 Later in life, we note, he typically thought of his own particular melancholy in terms of divine governance, or alternatively, perhaps something which at times came close to divine inspiration:130 ‘[T]hough tied and bound I am being used by the hand of a higher Power through my melancholy and my consciousness of sin.’131 As the Bible is a source of revelation in Kierkegaard’s thought-world, so also is the individual to whom life is, or may be, ‘a lesson leading to revelation’.132 The strong experience of melancholy was something he inherited from his father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard (1756–1838). In a note from 1848, Søren wrote, ‘I am indebted to my father for everything from the very beginning. Melancholy as he was,

126 127 128 129

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CD, 291. Nelson, ‘Revelation’, 67. Garff, Kierkegaard, 11. PV, 49; Murray Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 6. Rae, Theology, 6. Similarly in Point of View, where Kierkegaard writes, ‘This, my God-relationship, is in many ways the happy love of my unhappy and troubled life.’ PV, 71. However, see Kierkegaard, The Diary of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Gerda M. Anderson, ed. Peter P. Rohde (London: Peter Owen, 1961), 50. See Joakim Garff, ‘“What did I find? Not my I”: On Kierkegaard’s Journals and the Pseudonymous Autobiography ’, Kierkegaard Studies Year Book 2003 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), 110–24 [123]. Kierkegaard writes in 1853, that, ‘from a Christian point of view, to be loved by God and to love God is to suffer’. He also refers to his own particular suffering as a particular call from God; he could thus pray for all kinds of gifts from God in his life, ‘yet with one thing excepted, exemption from the deep suffering beneath which I have suffered from my earliest days, but which I understood as belonging to my relation to God’. The Journals of Kierkegaard 1834–1854, ed. and trans. Alexander Dru (London: Fontana Books, 1958), 225–7. Kierkegaard, Diary, 140. Timothy Houston Polk, The Biblical Kierkegaard: Reading by the Rule of Faith (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 89.

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when he saw me melancholy, he appealed to me: Be sure that you really love Jesus Christ.’133 As Murray Rae points out, ‘[t]hat advice became the passion of Kierkegaard’s life’.134 Michael Kierkegaard had a special gift in telling the biblical stories for his youngest son with extraordinary imagination. The one that made the deepest impression on young Søren was the story of the crucifixion of Christ. As Rae notes, What impressed the young child most of all in that story was the way in which the fickle crowd had turned against ‘the most compassionate man who ever lived’. The inexplicability of that would trouble Kierkegaard throughout his life, and accounts, in part, for the bitterness with which he denounced those in his own age who simply went along with the crowd.135 This experience, shaped by his own imagination, alongside that of his father, as well as his engagement with Pietistic sermons, caused Søren to write a revealing journal entry in 1849: ‘already as a small child I was told – and as solemnly as possible – that “the crowds” spit upon Christ, who was in fact the truth [. . .] This I have hid deep in my heart . . . This thought is my life.’136 Christ, the revelation of God, spat upon and rejected, becomes a recurring theme throughout Kierkegaard’s corpus, addressing ‘offense’ as the response to the God-man.137

A Revelatory Moment – Finding the Idea for Which I am Willing to Live and Die As a 22-year-old, Kierkegaard travelled north to spend two summer months at the coastal town Gilleleje, the northernmost point of Danish Zealand. During his stay away from his home in Copenhagen he authored a famous journal entry which he labelled ‘Gilleleje, August 1, 1835’. This early note was to capture a main concern of his in years to come: What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not about what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every action. It is a question of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do. It is a question of finding a truth that is truth for me, of finding the idea for which I am willing to live and die.138 As Garff points out, this entry by the young Kierkegaard ‘resembles the great breakthrough texts one finds in Augustine and Luther’.139 Thematically, Kierkegaard’s passionate question – ‘of understanding my destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do’ – here connects with two subsequent ideas in his authorship, both pertaining to indirect divine–human communication, namely the significance he attaches to divine governance – which became increasingly important towards the end of his life – and his view of the human self as a synthesis of the finite and the infinite. Self-experienced governance,140 on the one hand, and, in broader terms, the self as a synthesis marked by the

133 134 135 136

137 138 139 140

JP 6:6164, p. 12 / SKS 20, NB5:65, 399; Rae, Theology, 10. Rae, Theology, 10. Ibid., 11. Ibid.; JP 6:6389, p. 145 / SKS 21, NB10:191, pp. 356–7; cf. TSI, 106: The ethical and religious view of truth that Kierkegaard calls subjective truth ‘holds that wherever the crowd is, untruth is’. See, e.g., PC, 81–3; SUD, 83–4; and WL, 198–201; and note 93 above. Garff, Kierkegaard, 58. Ibid. See PV.

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God-relationship,141 on the other, can for Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms be regarded as channels for divine revelation, that is, indirect revelation, since it must be received through faith by finite human beings.

Reflecting on Self-Experienced Governance According to the Gilleleje journal entry, anticipated or self-experienced divine governance is an aspect of the thought of the young Kierkegaard as he seeks to understand his own destiny, of seeing what the Deity has in preparation for himself in the late summer of 1835. Also when looking back at his authorship several years later, he emphasizes the role of governance and senses that he has been guided by God in ways of which he was not aware at the time.142 In particular, Kierkegaard thinks this individually designed governance applies to his authorship. The writing, he senses, has ‘exploited its author in the service of a higher cause’,143 and, reflecting on his authorial career, he ponders what he infers to be ‘the foreign contribution’ to the authorship – as if he himself has had the function merely of co-author or ‘ghost-writer’.144 ‘As categorically defined as possible,’ he avers, ‘[i]t is . . . Governance which has educated me, and this education is reflected in the process of productivity.’145 In another self-biographical note, he considers such self-experienced divine intervention through governance to be laying more upon his heart than the whole authorship: ‘how infinitely much more Governance has done for me than I had ever expected, could have expected, or dared to have expected.’146 Regardless of hints like these, Kierkegaard did not in any way consider himself a man of spectacular revelatory experiences;147 on a general note, he does sympathize, however, with Augustine’s comments on God’s providential intervention in human life, extending to the small things in life, and not just the large ones.148 Kierkegaard can therefore say that ‘[i]t is precisely in little things that the greatness of God’s governance consists’.149 As a representative voice in the Moravian Pietistic tradition, we can also note Kierkegaard’s pious comment in a journal entry from 1839, where he writes, ‘The best proof that there is a just governance is to say: “I will believe it, come what may.” ’150 Such a view agreed with the general Lutheran understanding taught in Danish Schools, epitomized by the widely used primer for the Evangelical Christian Religion, the 1824 edition of the so-called Balle’s Primer.151

141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

149 150 151

As discussed, e.g., by Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus. PV, 76–7; cf. 74; Westphal, Concept, 4. Garff, ‘ “What did I find?” ’, 123. Ibid. Ibid.; trans. Garff, modified; PV, 79. OMWA, 12. CUP, 184; BA, x. Lee C. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 56; JP 2:1308, p. 87 / SKS 18, FF:88, p. 93; cf., however, PV, xviii. KJN, 2, p. 86 / SKS 28, FF:88, p. 93. KJN, 2, p. 273 (original italics) / SKS 18, JJ:469, p. 296. Nicolai Edinger Balle, Lærebog i den Evangelisk-christelige Religion, indrettet til Brug i de danske Skoler (Copenhagen: J. H. Schulz, 1824 [1791]); ASKB, 183. See further Chapter 12 in this volume by Nathan Paylor.

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VII. REVELATION – WHAT FORMS OF AUTHORITY AND TO WHOM? From the foregoing sections (I and II) we have seen that Kierkegaard draws a sharp distinction between beliefs and actions based on reason (immanence, the aesthetic) and those grounded in divine revelation (transcendence, the religious). In his view, a revelation should be believed because God has revealed it. Thus, an apostle who is called by a revelation basically has ‘no other evidence than his own statement, and at most his willingness to suffer everything joyfully for the sake of that statement’.152 Said otherwise, ‘Christianity . . . has entered into the world by the use of authority. It is not to be an object of speculation’ (Sections I–III).153 The revelatory force inherent in the Christian truth claim here stems from the appearance of the eternal in time – principally in the person of Jesus Christ, the ‘God-man’ – which makes the historical moment decisive for faith (Section III). As seen repeatedly throughout our discussion, in Kierkegaard’s view, special revelation – which belongs in the Christian sphere of the paradoxical-religious – is, and needs to be, marked by mystery (Sections III and V). To that effect he ponders in ‘The Difference between a Genius and an Apostle’ what he considers to be a critical confusion of his own age, namely the merging of the aesthetic and the religious: What is it that the erroneous . . . exegesis and speculative thought have done to confuse the essentially Christian, or by what means have they confused the essentially Christian [det Christelige]? Quite briefly and with categorical accuracy, it is the following: they have shifted the sphere of the paradoxical-religious back into the esthetic . . . When the sphere of the paradoxical-religious is now abolished or is explained back into the esthetic, an apostle becomes neither more nor less than a genius, and then good night to Christianity. Brilliance [Aandrighed] and spirit [Aand], revelation and originality, the call from God and genius, an apostle and a genius – all this ends up being just about one and the same.154 We see here how Kierkegaard occupies himself with the mainstream scholarly discourse on revelation which he believes has failed,155 resulting in a confused Christianity. The concern regarding the abolishing or explaining away of the sphere of the paradoxical-religious, which was expressed already in the opening lines of this chapter, is thus brought up once more. Kierkegaard–Climacus reminds us: ‘Revelation is marked by mystery . . . if this is not maintained, then the esthetic and the religious merge in common confusion’.156 To summarize, the present chapter has offered glimpses of some central aspects of the concept of revelation in Kierkegaard’s authorship (primarily from May 1843 onwards), including the necessity of revelation for knowledge of God, divine truth and human sinfulness (Section II). The key element in a revelation, Kierkegaard emphasizes, is authority (Section I). Moreover, the principal form of authority is heavenly, unless we are dealing 152 153 154 155

156

BA, 186. On criteria for genuine authority, see Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith, 245–56. BA, 330. BA, 173. Kierkegaard ascribes this failure (Vildfarelsen) on the part of exegesis and dogmatics/speculative thought not only to heterodoxy (Heterodoxien) but also to ultraorthodoxy (Hyper-Orthodoxien) and to thoughtlessness generally. BA, 173. CUP, 432n*, 213.

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with a confused form, as in the case of Adler, regarded by Kierkegaard to be a ‘confused lyrical genius’ (Section I).157 Magister Adler’s revelatory claim is used as a Hegelian– Platonic contrast by Kierkegaard in his own portrayal of authentic paradoxical-religious revelation (Introduction). When proceeding to special revelation in history, the God-man is said to have prevalence. Sacred Scripture here functions as a major source (Section III) and may, where appropriate, be complemented or supported by (ambivalent) general revelation (Section IV). Kierkegaard lays particular stress on appropriation through faith in regard to both special and general revelation (Section V); this is further illustrated with examples of revelatory experiences from his own life (Section VI). In closing, I will dwell once more on the key question of the chapter, ‘What forms of authority, and to whom?’, particularly concerning the concept of paradoxical-religious divine authority centred in the incarnation, its apostolic mediation and its personal address.

What Forms of Authority, and to Whom? A note from 1849 points to the forceful role of the incarnation: ‘Creation is really fulfilled only when God has included himself in it. Before Christ God was included, of course, in the creation but as an invisible mark, something like the water-mark in paper. But in the Incarnation creation is fulfilled by God’s including himself in it.’158 In answering the first part of this chapter’s question – What forms of authority? – the following three emphases seem to be at the heart of Kierkegaard’s thinking: the divine (not to be confused with immanent human authority), the apostolic (not to be confused with the ingenious) and the paradoxical-religious (not to be confused with immanent human rationality). As for the second part – to whom? – the simplest and perhaps most generous answer would be: general–ambivalent revelation to everyone and special–paradoxical revelation addressed to everyone159 (and by means of divine governance to the individual), with particular address to the individual who appropriates it by faith. A word by Kierkegaard will round off our discussion: God is personal, the matter is certain . . . It is God’s grace that in relation to you he desires to be personality; and if you squander his grace, he punishes you by relating himself objectively to you. And in this sense we can say that the world (despite all proofs!) does not have a personal God. For the world does not please God, and his punishment is to relate himself objectively to it, while he still certainly remains personality.160

FURTHER READING Deede, Kristen K. ‘The infinite qualitative difference: Sin, the self, and revelation in the thought of Søren Kierkegaard’. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 53 (2003): 25–48. Emmanuel, Steven M. Kierkegaard and the Concept of Revelation. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.

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BA, 81–2, 85. JP 2:1391, p. 113 / SKS 22, NB12:63, p. 177. Cf. WL, 100, 112; PC, 99. The Last Years: Journals 1853–1855, ed. and trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (London: Collins, 1965), 277.

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Evans, C. Stephen. ‘Kierkegaard, Natural Theology, and the Existence of God’. In Kierkegaard and Christian Faith, edited by Paul Martens and C. Stephen Evans, 25–38. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016. Nelson, Christopher A. P. ‘Revelation and the Revealed: The Crux of the Ethical-Religious Stadium’. In International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Book on Adler, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 67–95. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008. Turchin, Sean Anthony. ‘Revelation’. In Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Tome V: Objectivity to Sacrifice, edited by Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15: tome V, 239–44. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Christology: Ecce Homo! SYLVIA WALSH

INTRODUCTION Kierkegaard’s Christology is centred in three basic images of Jesus Christ in his unique capacity as the God-man or, more accurately, the God-human being (Gud-Mennesket): absolute paradox, redeemer and prototype.1 Under these images a number of topics relating to the life, person and work of Christ are addressed in his authorship, including Christ’s incarnation, lowliness, loftiness, abasement, suffering, obedience, boundless love, indirect communication, contradictoriness, offensiveness, contemporaneity, retrogression, selfdenial, sacrifice, crucifixion, atonement, forgiveness, ascension, truth, second coming and judgement.

I. CHRIST AS ABSOLUTE PARADOX Claiming that Jesus Christ is truly God and truly human, Kierkegaard clearly embraces the orthodox view of the incarnation of God in Christ ratified by the Council of Chalcedon in ad 451. Unlike traditional attempts to explain how Christ can be both divine and human, however, Kierkegaard views the incarnation as an ‘absolute paradox’ that cannot be rationally explained or comprehended but must be either passionately believed or denied.2 The reader is first introduced to Christ as absolute paradox in Philosophical Fragments, where the pseudonymous author Johannes Climacus concocts a poem or fairy tale about a king (the god) who loves a lowly maiden (humankind) to illustrate the eternal resolve of the deity to bring about reconciliation between them out of love.3 Due to their unequal status, however, the king/god is faced with the problem of how to bring about equality, unity and understanding between them in a happy love relation, for in Climacus’s view ‘only in love is the different made equal, and

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The Danish term Kierkegaard generally uses to designate the humanity of Christ is Menneske or ‘human being’, which includes both men and women, rather than Mand, the Danish term specifically for a male human being. ‘Human being’ is thus a more precise translation of this term. On this issue see Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997), 22. See David R. Law, ‘The Existential Chalcedonian Christology of Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity’, in Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook: Kierkegaard’s Late Writings, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser and K. Brian Söderquist (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 129–51. In referring to ‘the god’ (Guden) rather than ‘God’ (Gud) in this text, Climacus uses the Platonic term for the divine as translated during Kierkegaard’s time.

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only in equality or in unity is there understanding’.4 Unity may be achieved either by an ascent or exaltation of the maiden/humankind or by a descent to her level on the part of the king/god. The king/god decides that only the latter option can guarantee a happy love relation as the former would essentially constitute a deception or mere change of costume for the maiden, not true equality with him. To achieve true equality with her, then, the king/god must appear as the lowliest of persons by taking on the form of a servant – not as a disguise, incognito or ‘something put on’ but as his true form.5 As the lowliest of the low or one who must serve others, he must also suffer all things, making his whole life a story of suffering. Climacus thus clearly rejects a docetic interpretation of the incarnation in which the divine only ‘appears’ or ‘seems’ to take on human form. Whether he espouses a kenotic (‘self-emptying’) interpretation of the incarnation in alluding to Phil. 2.5-8, where Christ is described as emptying himself by taking on the humble form of a slave, is a point of contention among some Kierkegaard commentators. There is wide agreement, however, that Kierkegaard’s Christology does contain some kenotic elements, although differing somewhat from other nineteenthcentury versions of kenoticism.6 Readily admitting that the poem is not his own invention, Climacus claims that a revelation from the god is required in order to come up with such a story. He grants that a human being might poetize himself in likeness to the god or the god in likeness to a human being but not that the god would poetize himself in likeness to a human being since the god has no need of a human being. Consequently, he concludes that such a thought did not arise in any human heart but is ‘the wonder’ or miracle that cannot be explained.7 In coming up against the absolute paradox of the incarnation, therefore, both human imagination and human reason reach their limits and downfall. The ultimate passion and paradox of human thought, Climacus observes, is ‘to discover something that thought itself cannot think’, namely the unknown or the god, who in his view is absolutely different from a human being and thus cannot be thought inasmuch as there is no distinguishing mark by which something absolutely different from us can be known.8 To know that the god is absolutely different from a human being, and vice versa, that a human being is absolutely different from the god through his or her own fault due to sin, requires a revelation from the god. At the same time that the absolute paradox manifests itself negatively in revealing the absolute difference of sin, it also manifests itself positively by annulling this absolute difference in absolute equality. To Climacus, however, such a paradox is inconceivable: ‘The understanding certainly cannot think it, cannot hit upon it on its own, and if it is proclaimed, the understanding cannot understand it and merely detects that it will likely be its downfall.’9 To will its own downfall in the happy passion of faith is to reach a mutual understanding of the understanding with

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PF, 25 / SKS 4, 232. PF, 31 / SKS 4, 238. See Tim Rose, Kierkegaard’s Christocentric Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), 111–12; David R. Law, Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Lee C. Barrett, Eros and SelfEmptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013), 305–23; David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 169n39; Sylvia Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 129–30. PF, 36 / SKS 4, 242. PF, 37 / SKS 4, 243. PF, 47 / SKS 4, 252.

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the absolute paradox, which announces itself as a paradox to the understanding. Thus, if the understanding takes offence at the absolute paradox, declaring it to be foolish and absurd, that is only an ‘acoustical illusion’, ‘echo’, ‘caricature’ or ‘parroting’ of what the absolute paradox announces about itself to the understanding, not something the understanding has discovered on its own and directed back upon the absolute paradox as an objection to it.10 Is the absolute paradox, then, really absurd? Climacus states that the understanding’s conclusion about the absolute paradox is ‘an erroneous accounting’, ‘conclusion of untruth’ or ‘misunderstanding’ of the paradox which copies it ‘in the wrong way’ because it regards the absurdity of the absolute paradox as an objection, whereas ‘the paradox is indeed the paradox quia absurdum [because it is absurd]’.11 He explicitly alludes here to the early Christian thinker Tertullian (c. AD 155/160–c. 240), who famously stated, ‘The Son of God was crucified; I am not ashamed because men must needs be ashamed of it. And the Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed, because it is absurd [quia ineptum est]. And he was buried, and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible [certum est quia impossible].’12 In citing Tertullian, Climacus seems to be asserting that the absolute paradox is indeed absurd. For Tertullian, however, the incarnation is not really absurd or impossible but only seems to be so from the limited standpoint of worldly wisdom, for in his view all things are possible for God except that which is against the divine will. When Climacus returns to the question of the absurdity of the absolute paradox in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, however, he makes a distinction between a Socratic paradox and the absolute paradox. In a Socratic paradox the eternal essential truth is not itself a paradox but becomes paradoxical by virtue of being related to an existing individual as an objective uncertainty to which that person is passionately committed, while the absolute paradox is a paradox by virtue of having come into existence in time as an individual human being, which Climacus identifies with the absurd.13 For him the absolute paradox is absurd ‘precisely because it contains the contradiction that something that can become historical only in direct opposition to all human understanding has become historical’, and it is absolute precisely because it cannot be resolved or understood.14 Indeed, for Climacus the only possible understanding of the absolute paradox is to understand that it cannot be understood except in the sense of comprehending ‘ever more deeply what a paradox is and that the paradox is the paradox’.15 Unlike Tertullian, then, Climacus seems to hold that the absolute paradox is indeed absurd. Inasmuch as he does not claim to be a Christian, however, he must be understood as construing the absolute paradox or incarnation from the perspective of a person outside of faith, as indicated in his polemical response to Magnus Eiríksson, also known by the pseudonym Theophilus Nicolaus, in Kierkegaard’s journals, where Climacus writes,

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PF, 51–2 / SKS 4, 254–5. See also Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 54–62. PF, 51–2 / SKS 4, 254–5. Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 12. CUP, 209–10 / SKS 7, 191–2. CUP, 211 / SKS 7, 194. CUP, 220 / SKS 7, 201.

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When I believe, then assuredly neither faith nor the content of faith is absurd. O, no, no – but I understand very well that for the person who does not believe, faith and the content of faith are absurd, and I also understand that as soon as I myself am not in the faith, am weak, when doubt perhaps begins to stir, then faith and the content of faith gradually begin to become absurd for me.16 Ultimately in agreement with Tertullian, therefore, Climacus views the concept of the absurd as a category of the human understanding or worldly wisdom, not as a qualification of the incarnation or absolute paradox itself, which is not absurd to the person of faith, for whom all things are possible for God. But he does regard the absurd as a negative sign that is an essential dialectical element in coming to faith inasmuch as it assures that the absolute paradox as the content of faith is not possible from a merely human point of view nor is it a higher form of knowledge or rationality. Kierkegaard’s Christian pseudonym Anti-Climacus fully agrees with Climacus: ‘The God-human being [Gud-Mennesket] is the paradox, absolutely the paradox; therefore it is altogether certain that the understanding must come to a standstill on it.’17 Over against the speculative Christologies of his time, especially those of the left-wing Hegelians David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, Anti-Climacus is intent on pointing out that the God-human being is not the union of God and humanity, as the left Hegelians claim, but the unity of God and an individual human being. ‘Humanly speaking,’ he contends, ‘there is no possibility of a crazier composite than this either in heaven or on earth or in the abyss or in the most fantastic aberrations of thought.’18 Anti-Climacus thus places his focus primarily on the possibility of offence at Christ, which may be likened to the crossroad or standing at the crossroad from which one must turn either to offence or to faith. One never comes to the latter without first encountering the possibility of offence, which takes three forms. The first form does not pertain directly to Christ as the God-human being but only as an individual human being who comes into collision with the established order by being unwilling to subject or subordinate himself to its authority. Such insubordination suggests to the established order that Christ is more than a human being, perhaps even divine, in another instance of an acoustic illusion in which the established order projects its own false claim to be divine upon Christ as a blasphemy against itself. While this form of the possibility of offence in relation to Christ was ‘a historically vanishing possibility that vanished with his death’, Anti-Climacus observes that it is not restricted to Christ but can apply to any individual who is unwilling to subordinate himself or herself to the established order of the time.19 The second and third possibilities of offence at Christ are essential, interrelated and trans-historical in character, meaning that they have to do specifically with Christ as the God-human being, that they are based on a combination of the two rather than either one alone and that they will persist until the end of time. The first possibility of essential offence pertains specifically to the qualification ‘God’ in Christ’s composition as the Godhuman being, namely the loftiness that is implied by his indirectly speaking and acting as if he were God. Anti-Climacus cites Mt. 11.6 / Lk. 7.23; Jn 6.61-2, 66; Mt. 9.4; 12.24; 26.64-5; and Jn 8.48, 52, 53; 10.20, 30-3 as direct or implied instances of this possibility 16 17 18

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JP 6:6598, p. 301 / SKP X 6 B 68, p. 75. PC, 82 / SKS 12, 93, translation modified. PC, 82 / SKS 12, 92. On the speculative Christology of Strauss and Feuerbach, see Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly, 125–7. PC, 94 / SKS 12, 102.

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of offence.20 Here the possibility of offence lies essentially in the fact that Christ is a lowly individual human being who acts in the character of God. Inasmuch as it is impossible to demonstrate that he is God, this possibility of offence must be encountered by everyone and cannot be avoided but must be passed through and overcome by believing in him. Conversely, the second possibility of essential offence pertains to Christ’s lowliness, namely ‘that the one who passes himself off as God proves to be the lowly, poor, suffering and finally powerless human being’.21 In this instance the possibility of offence lies in the ‘boundless self-contradiction’ that ‘God should be a mortal human being like this’.22 As Anti-Climacus sees it, the direction of this possibility of offence is ambiguous in that one may be offended that this lowly human being is supposed to be God or conversely that God is supposed to be the son of a carpenter and suffer in the manner of a human being. Corresponding to the latter possibility of offence is another possibility of offence connected with becoming and being a Christian, namely that truly to be a Christian in the world means to be the abased one, to voluntarily suffer ‘every possible evil, every mockery and insult, and finally to be punished as a criminal’ in likeness to Christ – a possibility of offence we shall consider in connection with Christ as prototype.23 With respect to the possibility of offence in relation to Christ, however, it is important to note that neither the lowliness nor the loftiness of Christ by itself presents the possibility of offence but only a combination of the two in him, who is ‘a composite and yet one and the same, is the abased one and the lofty one’, making it impossible to choose Christ as one but not the other.24 Another way of expressing this duplexity is to say that Christ is a sign of contradiction. Anti-Climacus explains that a sign ‘is something different from what it immediately is’, while a sign of contradiction is to be the opposite of what something immediately is or appears to be.25 In order to know that something is a sign, however, there must be something that draws attention to it or suggests that it is a sign (such as a miracle or direct statement about being God by Christ), although one may not be certain that it is a sign or what it is supposed to mean. As a sign of contradiction, Christ’s lowliness is a sign of his loftiness, indicating that the kind of contradiction he exemplifies is neither a formal or logical contradiction nor an apparent contradiction, both of which are applicable only in the realm of thought, but a qualitative contradiction, namely the contradiction between being God and being an individual human being, which in Anti-Climacus’s view is the greatest possible contradiction because it unites opposites in existence, not merely in thought, and cannot be mediated by abstract or speculative thought.26 As the absolute paradox, then, Christ is the object of faith and exists only for faith. In Anti-Climacus’s view, nothing can be known about him from history, as it is impossible to demonstrate anything about him either on that basis or by speculative thought. This does not mean, however, that nothing can be known about the historical Jesus, as 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

PC, 94, 98–9, 101–2 / SKS 12, 103, 107–8, 109–10. PC, 102 / SKS 12, 111. PC, 102, translation modified. PC, 106 / SKS 12, 114. PC, 160 / SKS 12, 164. PC, 124 / SKS 12, 129. PC, 125, 131 / SKS 12, 130, 135. See also C. Stephen Evans, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 96–109; Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly, 129.

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some biblical scholars have claimed.27 Rather, Anti-Climacus’s point is that history can tell us nothing about who he was in truth, namely God incarnate. The most it can demonstrate about Jesus is that he was a great man, perhaps the greatest man who ever lived, but not that he was God. To conclude the latter on the basis of the results of his life as a human being, Anti-Climacus charges, is to commit the logical fallacy of a μετάβασις εἰς άλλο γένος (a shifting from one category to another) as well as blasphemy inasmuch as there is an infinite qualitative difference between a human being and God that blocks any and every conclusion that ‘ergo he is God’.28 On the contrary, as Anti-Climacus sees it, Christ is absolutely unrecognizable as God and cannot communicate who he is directly, having assumed ‘the most profound incognito’ by appearing in the form of a servant and subjecting himself to the suffering, both external and internal, that is associated with it.29 Indeed, part of the suffering Christ has to endure in the incognito of a servant is the grievous inward suffering he bears out of love in having to conceal who he really is. This concealment is necessary in order to require not only the decision of faith or offence on the part of all those who encounter him but also so that he may become the object of faith, which in its most eminent sense is related to the God-human being, who makes himself into a question so we may freely choose whether to believe or to be offended at him.

II. CHRIST AS REDEEMER Like the image of Christ as the absolute paradox, the image of Christ as the redeemer of humankind also makes its first appearance in Philosophical Fragments in the context of a poetic thought-project contrasting two alternative ways of coming to know eternal truth. The first is an immanent path to eternal truth by way of the Socratic–Platonic doctrine of recollection, which assumes an essential unity between the human and the divine and thus an eternal possession of the truth by human beings that needs only to be recollected by the learner through the help of a human teacher or midwife such as Socrates. In the alternative path to eternal truth proposed by Climacus the learner does not possess eternal truth, having forfeited it through his or her own fault and being unable retrieve it on his or her own. In this path to eternal truth, therefore, the learner must depend on the teacher to provide both the truth and the condition for understanding it by bringing about a total transformation of the learner, which no human being can do. The teacher in this instance, therefore, must be the god himself, who comes into existence at a decisive moment in time in order to free the learner from his or her self-bondage to untruth. This scenario is obviously a thinly veiled depiction of the Christian view of the human condition and way to eternal truth, which Climacus tacitly admits by proceeding to substitute Christian terminology to describe it. The learner’s condition of untruth is labeled sin; the teacher who brings the truth and the condition for understanding it is a saviour, deliverer and reconciler; the condition itself is identified as faith, which requires the learner to undergo a conversion or turning around, repentance for having departed from the truth in the first place and a total transformation of his or her being which may be likened to a rebirth. Finally, the decisive moment in which all of this occurs is called the fullness of time, namely the temporal appearance of God or the eternal, whose coming is not simply a historical fact 27 28 29

See further Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly, 122. PC, 27, 29 / SKS 12, 41, 44, translation modified. PC, 128 / SKS 12, 132.

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or eternal fact but an absolute fact that is historical yet contemporaneous to every generation as its point of departure for eternal happiness. The theme of Christ as redeemer is addressed more fully by Anti-Climacus in Practice in Christianity, which opens with an exposition of Christ’s invitation in Mt. 11.28: ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest.’ Just as God’s incarnation in Christ is motivated by love for humankind in Climacus’s account, so also for Anti-Climacus it was precisely out of love that Christ came to earth and issues the invitation to all those in need of help to come to him. According to Anti-Climacus, Christ ‘comes on his own initiative’, ‘makes no condition whatsoever’ and shows ‘not the slightest partiality’ in issuing the invitation to all but each one separately as an individual.30 Unlike human sympathy, which is willing to help those in need but unwilling to share a common household with them, Christ chose to live in the same manner as the poorest of the poor, sharing the very same condition as all those who are invited to come to him. Like the king in Climacus’s parable of the king and the maiden, ‘he must either alter his condition and make it identical with the sufferer’s or make the sufferer’s condition identical with his own’.31 If one wants to invite all sufferers to come to one, however, the only way that can be done is by altering one’s own condition in likeness to theirs. Anti-Climacus thus emphasizes that the inviter is the lowly or abased Christ, who presents the possibility of offence because no one is allowed to accept the invitation without also accepting the inviter as the object of faith. And no one can become a believer except by coming to him in his state of abasement in the situation of contemporaneity, which involves suffering in a way akin to his suffering. Anti-Climacus divides Christ’s life into two periods, both of which fall essentially under the category of abasement. In the first period Christ enjoys some success among the common folk, who see him as the king who will usher in the golden age, but not with the powerful and influential cultured elite of the established order, who regard him as foolish, ignorant, presumptuous, delusional and mad in claiming to be God. In the second period, all their predictions of his downfall come true as the people begin to turn away from him, the established order sets a trap to ensnare him and he is finally put to death on a cross. It is thus the abasement and suffering of Christ that Anti-Climacus wishes to emphasize in Christ’s life, leading him to pose the following ironic question: ‘How then can this misrelation of actuality, this frightful inverted relation, be explained, that no one or almost no one accepted the invitation, but that all, almost all . . . are in agreement about opposing the inviter, putting him to death, yes, even putting a penalty upon letting oneself be helped by him!’32 Anti-Climacus suggests that it was because Christ exhibited divine compassion in the ‘unlimited recklessness’ with which he concerned himself with the sufferings of others rather than his own.33 People are willing to be compassionate to a certain degree and to be moved by poetic depictions of it, he observes, but quite literally to make oneself one with the most wretched is ‘too much’ to see and tolerate in actuality and everyday life.34 As Anti-Climacus sees it, therefore, Christ’s whole life was a story of suffering, not just at the end when he endured physical suffering and mistreatment from the crowd and his enemies and was betrayed by the few who believed

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PC, 12–13 / SKS 12, 22–3. PC, 13 / SKS 12, 24. PC, 57 / SKS 12, 69. PC, 58 / SKS 12, 70. PC, 59 / SKS 12, 71.

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in him. He also suffered inwardly at having to conceal who he was and the fact that his suffering was out of love in order to save people, thereby making it an occasion for the possibility of offence, which for Anti-Climacus is ‘the most bitter of all’ suffering.35 Elsewhere in Kierkegaard’s writings Christ’s entire earthly life is again described as ‘sheer suffering of mind and spirit through belonging to the fallen human race’ and as ‘the heaviest suffering, heavier than any mortal being’s can ever be, heavier than an human being can imagine, heavier than any language can express’, yet totally without guilt and necessary for learning obedience on his part.36 What Christ learned from his sufferings was human obedience, which is integrally related to his abasement in being embodied as a human being. But his suffering was also superhuman in being abandoned by God, which, in Kierkegaard’s view, establishes ‘an eternal chasmic abyss’ between his suffering and that of other human beings.37 In his journals of 1847 Kierkegaard observes, ‘Seldom is the attempt made truly to understand how Christ . . . came to be crucified.’38 Soon thereafter he proposed to take up this issue in a new book to be called ‘How did it happen, then, that Jesus Christ could be crucified? Or: Has a [hu]man [being] the right to sacrifice his life for the truth?’39 This question became the subject of the first essay in Two Ethical-Religious Essays by the pseudonymous author H. H. Although the author can understand that Christ was willing to sacrifice his life out of love for humankind, what he cannot comprehend is how Christ could allow human beings to become guilty of putting him to death in the first place. Seeking to shed light on this historical event, he suggests several possible avenues of inquiry that might explain how it could have happened but finds such reflection to be useless and a distraction from the main issue, namely Christ’s claim to be God, which required one either to worship him or to join in killing him. Nor does such speculation address the question that really concerns H. H., namely how Christ the Loving One could have allowed human beings to become guilty of his murder, which is the issue that constitutes the main focus of this essay. H. H. concludes that Christ’s death was an atoning death and a sacrifice he freely willed to make, but it was dialectical in character inasmuch as he wanted to save the world by his death yet was not responsible for being persecuted and put to death. Although Christ wanted to avoid persecution he was willing to suffer and did suffer for the sake of humankind. H. H. nevertheless holds that the atonement cannot be comprehended but must be believed, for to comprehend his life humanly is to lose what his life is for faith, namely ‘the divine-human’.40 As H. H. sees it, then, Christ’s death has retroactive power to atone for the guilt of crucifying him, that is, ‘his death is the Atonement for his death’.41 It is also the atonement for the whole human race, but in order for him to die the contemporary generation had to become guilty of murder, which Christ could have prevented. If that had happened, however, the atonement would have become impossible. H. H. thus concludes that, unlike Christ, a human being does not have the right to let himself or herself be put to death for the truth because it would allow others to become guilty of murder, which in his view would be an even greater guilt on

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PC, 138 / SKS 12, 141. CD, 259 / SKS 10, 272; UDVS, 255 / SKS 8, 353. UDVS, 281 / SKS 8, 377. JP 1:305, p. 129 / KJN 4, p. 153 / SKS 20, NB2:37, pp. 155–6. JP 5:6050, p. 405 / KJN 4, p. 157 / SKS 20, NB2:157, pp. 203–4. WA, 65 / SKS 11, 71. WA, 64 / SKS 11, 70.

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the part of the victim because it would promote the pretension that the martyred person is in absolute possession of the truth, which no human being can claim.42 In a later journal entry, however, Kierkegaard suggests another vantage point on Christ’s death, namely that he let the situation develop to the point of death because he is love and his death is ‘the Atonement also for those who took his life’.43 Therefore, if he had not been put to death, he would not have attained his destiny. But no human being has the right to think that his or her sufferings will atone for or be beneficial to others because this would make that person more than human, which no human being is. It is in Kierkegaard’s Discourses at the Communion on Fridays that the suffering, death and atonement of Christ are primarily addressed in Kierkegaard’s authorship.44 Taking the passage from Lk. 22.15 in which Christ says ‘I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer’ as the theme of his first communion discourse, Kierkegaard suggests that these words uttered by Christ on the night he was betrayed constitute ‘the true godly introduction’ to the Lord’s supper, to which every individual likewise must come with heartfelt longing for communion with Christ through this sacred meal instituted in remembrance of him.45 Describing the Passover scene as if it were happening before our very eyes, Kierkegaard stresses Christ’s foreknowledge of his impending betrayal and ignominious death as well as his sense of aloneness at the Passover meal, in Gethsemane and in bearing the sins of the world. What is emphasized most of all, however, is the longing for communion by the imagined communicant, whose reflections on the vanity of temporal life, the uncertainty of everything except death and the horrid loneliness of human life lead him to increased longing for communion with God through Christ, the one and only ‘trustworthy friend in heaven and on earth’ who was faithful not merely unto death but precisely in death, saving the communicant’s life, which was dead, and giving him new life by the faithful friend’s death.46 This recognition touches off another round of sobering self-reminders of the deep corruption of sin in nations and every human being and the extraordinary scale of evil in the world, requiring a revelation from God to learn how deep humanity has sunk. Above all, however, the communicant is reminded of the terrible physical and psychical sufferings of Christ that resulted from his becoming embodied as a human being and mocked, insulted and spat upon by those gathered at the appalling scene of his trial and crucifixion. This leads the communicant to contemplate the following possibility: ‘Suppose I had lived at the same time as that appalling scene, suppose I had been present in “the crowd” that mocked him

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See further Lee C. Barrett, ‘Kierkegaard on the Problem of Witnessing While Yet Being a Sinner ’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Without Authority, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2006), 147–75; Christopher B. Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 184–9. JP 2:1921, p. 361 / SKS 25, NB27:86, p. 201. See also Lee C. Barrett, ‘Christ’s Efficacious Love and Human Responsibility: The Lutheran Dialectic of “Discourses at the Communion on Fridays”’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007), 251–72; David R. Law, ‘Kierkegaard’s Understanding of the Eucharist in Christian Discourses, Part Four ’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Christian Discourses and Crisis, 273–97; Sylvia Walsh, ‘Introduction’ to Søren Kierkegaard, Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 1–33, hereafter referred to by the siglum DCF; Sylvia Walsh Perkins, ‘At the Foot of the Altar: Kierkegaard’s Communion Discourses as the Resting Point of His Authorship’, in The Theologically Formed Heart: Essays in Honor of David J. Gouwens, ed. Warner M. Bailey, Lee C. Barrett III and James O. Duke (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014), 241–63. DCF, 39 / CD, 252 / SKS 10, 266. DCF, 44 / CD, 258 / SKS 10, 271.

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and spat upon him!’47 While not daring to believe that he would have been one of the twelve disciples, he does not believe that he would have been present in order to take part in this atrocity, but neither would he have been so bold as to abstain if threatened by the crowd for not participating. He thus admits, ‘I certainly would have participated in the mockery – in order to save my life’; thus ‘it would not have gone any better for me than the multitude of people’.48 The broader implication of this hypothetical admission of personal complicity in bringing about the death of Christ is that the Jews who killed him ‘were not greater criminals than other people’, but because they were contemporaries of Christ their crime was ‘so infinitely more terrible’.49 The communicant’s admission of personal complicity also has the effect of heightening his longing for communion with Christ, who has made satisfaction, he believes, ‘for my every slightest actual sin, but also for the one that perhaps lurks deepest in my soul without my being aware of it and that could still possibly break out when I am led into the most frightful decisive situation’.50 In a rare allusion to the resurrection of Christ, the discourse ends with the further claim that Christ ‘is not a dead person but one who is living’, the personal implication for the communicant being that ‘you must indeed truly live in and together with him, he must indeed be and become your life, so that you do not live yourself, no longer live yourself, but Christ lives in you’.51 Reflecting the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation, in which the real presence of Christ is thought to be in, with and under the communion elements in a spiritual manner, Kierkegaard maintains that Christ is personally present at the altar. It is therefore essential that one hear his voice there; otherwise one goes to communion in vain. Upon leaving the altar, however, one must remain at the altar, so to speak, in one’s daily life by making one’s life a ‘divine service every day’ in constant communion with Christ, who accompanies one wherever one goes.52 Another communion discourse takes a phrase from 1 Cor. 11.23, ‘the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed’, as its basis for reflection on Christ’s death. Here Kierkegaard endeavours to bring the appalling scene of Christ’s suffering and death ‘quite vividly’ before the reader’s eyes.53 In accordance with the inverse dialectic that governs his understanding of Christianity, Kierkegaard describes Christ’s life as one of retrogression rather than progression; that is, instead of moving up the ladder of honour, prestige and power in the world, finally reaching the top step with approval and admiration by all, Christ ascends inversely by descending step by step ‘through all the marks of abasement’ until at last he stands alone and at the decisive moment, ‘in the twinkling of an eye’, is finally crucified.54 While this night was an historical event which the human race might well wish out of its history, Kierkegaard paradoxically maintains that it is ‘not a bygone event, not a past event, although it is past, not a past event over and done with, although it was eighteen hundred years ago’.55 Moreover, the whole human race, not just the generation contemporaneous with Christ, is responsible for his death. What is again emphasized in this discourse is our individual responsibility and culpability as members

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

DCF, 45 / CD, 259 / SKS 10, 272. DCF, 46 / CD, 259–60 / SKS 10, 273. DCF, 47 / CD, 260 / SKS 10, 274. DCF, 47 / CD, 260 / SKS 10, 274. DCF, 48 / CD, 261 / SKS 10, 274. DCF, 60 / CD, 274 / SKS 10, 292. DCF, 63 / CD, 276 / SKS 10, 296. DCF, 63–4 / CD, 277 / SKS 10, 297. On inverse dialectic see Walsh, Living Christianly. DCF, 65 / CD, 277–8 / SKS 10, 297–8.

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of the human race for the death of Christ. Going beyond the earlier communicant’s hypothetical presence at a past event, Kierkegaard maintains that ‘we are not spectators and observers at a past event, we are indeed accomplices in a present event’.56 Even if we think we would not have crucified him, we too would have betrayed him by fleeing, staying home or keeping our distance, thus bestowing upon him ‘the most painful blow’ that can be inflicted upon love, namely betrayal.57 For the communicant, however, to see love betrayed in this way is enough for him to understand something about himself, namely that he is a sinner who stands all the more in need of an atoner in whom he can take refuge. Thus the anxiety that would frighten him away from Christ in betrayal is precisely what will attach him to Christ in response to the irresistible movement of his heart by the miracle of Christ’s love, which ‘without doing anything – by suffering he moves every person who has a heart’.58 Because Christ is love he uses the occasion of betrayal to institute the Lord’s supper as the means of reconciliation in return. And when he is crucified his death upon the cross is the sacrifice of atonement for the sin of the world as well as for his crucifixion. The question of how the atonement of Christ is accomplished is addressed in two ways by Kierkegaard. The first appears in a communion discourse titled ‘The High Priest’, based on Heb. 4.15: ‘For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.’59 This discourse spells out Kierkegaard’s understanding of the atonement in terms of Christ as the high priest and sacrificial victim who in line with Old Testament tradition makes a sin offering or sacrifice to expiate or atone for the sins of the world rather than to propitiate or appease God for them. Addressing the universal complaint of sufferers and other persons who are severely tried in temptation and spiritual trials that no one understands them and thus cannot sympathize or put themselves in their place, Kierkegaard suggests that Christ is able to have true sympathy and to put himself entirely in every sufferer’s place in several ways: first of all by becoming a human being like us; secondly by suffering and being tempted infinitely more than any other human being, yet without sin, which is the only way in which Christ does not and cannot put himself in our place; and thirdly by making satisfaction for our sin and guilt through his suffering and death, literally suffering the punishment of sin in our place so that we may be saved and live, which for Kierkegaard is precisely what the atonement means: For what is the ‘Atoner’ but a substitute who puts himself entirely in your place and in mine; and what is the consolation of the atonement but this, that the substitute, making satisfaction, puts himself entirely in your and in my place! So when punitive justice here in the world or hereafter in the judgment seeks the place where I the sinner stand with all my guilt, with my many sins – it does not find me; I no longer stand in that place. I have left it; another stands there in my place, another who puts himself entirely in my place; I stand saved by the side of this other person, by the side of him, my Atoner, who entirely put himself in my place.60

56 57 58 59 60

DCF, 65 / CD, 278 / SKS 10, 298. DCF, 67 / CD, 279 / SKS 10, 299. DCF, 68 / CD, 280 / SKS 10, 300. DCF, 91 / WA, 115 / SKS 11, 251. DCF, 99 / WA, 123 / SKS 11, 258–9.

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As this passage demonstrates, Kierkegaard understands Christ’s suffering and death primarily in terms of a sacrificial, substitutionary theory of atonement, although traces of an Abelardian or Schleiermachian moral influence theory can also be seen in the discourse where Christ’s sacrificial love is described as moving the communicant to take refuge in him in response. Kierkegaard is not interested, however, in explicating a theory of the atonement as such but in showing its personal meaning for the single individual seeking forgiveness and reconciliation with God and Christ at the altar. The second way atonement is wrought by Christ is by hiding a multitude of sins in and through his death. Taking his text from 1 Pet. 4.8, ‘Love covers a multitude of sins’, Kierkegaard suggests that Christ’s sacrificial love hides a multitude of sins of the whole world, not just a few individuals. Christ makes satisfaction by covering our sins with his holy body so that they literally cannot be seen by God. In another communion discourse, however, he claims that Christ’s sacrifice was ‘not for human beings in general, nor did he want to save human beings in general’ but ‘each one individually’.61 In the inner recesses of every human being, he claims, there is a ‘privy preacher’ or conscience that accompanies us wherever we go and whatever we do and does not allow us to hide our sins from ourselves no matter how much we attempt to avoid or flee from them or feel the need to do so.62 Conscience thus leads us to seek a hiding place where we may be separated from our sins and the consciousness of sin in a forgiveness that does not increase our sin and guilt but takes it away in oblivion. As Kierkegaard sees it, Christ’s atoning death literally does just that. Like the biblical figure of the mother hen who gathers and protects her chicks under her wings (Mt. 23.37), Christ hides our sin with his body and death. But whereas the chicks would lose their hiding place if the mother’s life were taken away, Christ covers our sin precisely in and by his death, which cannot be taken away. Kierkegaard thus concludes that ‘only by remaining in him do you have life’ and ‘only by identifying yourself with him are you in hiding and there is a cover over the multitude of your sins’.63 Finally, Kierkegaard reminds us that we are capable of doing absolutely nothing at all to atone for our sins before God: ‘If at the altar you want to be able to do the least thing yourself, even merely to step forward yourself, then you upset everything, prevent the atonement, make the satisfaction impossible.’64 Indeed, we are not even able to hold fast the thought of our unworthiness or that we stand entirely in need of grace and the blessing of Christ, who is himself the blessing received at the altar.

III. CHRIST AS PROTOTYPE Although ‘the Atonement and grace are and remain what is definitive’ for Kierkegaard, the image of Christ as the prototype for humankind is prominent in his later Christian writings and journals in order to counteract the tendency in Christendom to take Christ purely as redeemer and omit his qualification as prototype, thus exempting itself from imitation.65 But neither did Christ come into the world just to set an example for us, as that would merely reintroduce the law and works-righteousness, against which Luther

61 62 63 64 65

DCF, 58–9 / CD, 272 / SKS 10, 290. DCF, 138 / WA, 183 / SKS 12, 297. DCF, 143 / WA, 188 / SKS 12, 302. DCF, 86 / CD, 299 / SKS 10, 324. JP 2:1909, p. 353 / KJN 8, p. 492 / SKS 24, NB25:67, pp. 483–4.

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fought so hard. Rather, in Kierkegaard’s view Christ came both to save us and to present the example for us to follow. Christ’s dual roles as redeemer and prototype thus stand in a complementary dialectical relation to one another, each implying and necessitating the other, as expressed in the following prayer from Judge for Yourself!: Help us all . . . you who are both the prototype and the Redeemer, and in turn both the Redeemer and the prototype, so that when the striving one droops under the prototype, crushed, almost despairing, the Redeemer raises him up again; but at the same moment you are again the prototype so that he may be kept in the striving.66 As Kierkegaard sees it, Christ’s role as redeemer and atoner of humankind is stressed in the New Testament epistles, while his role as prototype is emphasized in the gospels.67 In a way, however, the atonement itself points to Christ as prototype inasmuch as ‘putting on Christ’ means not only to appropriate his merits for salvation but also to seek to resemble him by borrowing his clothes, as it were, so as to reproduce him.68 Christ is both the atoner for the past and the prototype for the future, but as the God-human being who is our redeemer and atoner he is ‘heterogeneous to an ordinary human being by a full quality’ and thus not altogether literally or directly a prototype for us.69 Kierkegaard thus makes a distinction between Christ as prototype or exemplar (Forbilledet) and as example or pattern (Exempel).70 As prototype, he is the first or ideal type of what it means to be a human being or member of the human race, which is essentially related to the divine but has become ‘more or less degenerate’ and corrupt, therefore all the more in need of a prototype to show us ‘the lofty creation’ we are intended to be as a result of being created in God’s image.71 As the prototype of humankind, therefore, Christ fulfills the ideal requirement of human perfection against which every human being is measured but which no human being can possibly meet, with the result that, in accordance with the second use of the law in Lutheran doctrine, the primary function of the prototype is to teach us how greatly we need grace.72 As pattern, Christ sets an example for imitation or following after him (Efterfølgelse) by leaving his footprints for anyone who would be his disciple to follow, which means that one must walk along the same road he walked in lowliness, abasement, self-denial and voluntary suffering. Moreover, one must walk it alone, taking up one’s cross and denying oneself in obedience unto death, perhaps even becoming a martyr.73 The principle that holds with respect to the imitation of Christ therefore is, ‘As was the prototype, so must the imitation [Efterfølgelsen] also be.’74 In order to fulfill his role as prototype Christ had to undergo a process of development, learning perfect obedience from what he suffered. ‘If it were possible for a human being to learn obedience to God without sufferings,’ Kierkegaard observes, ‘then Christ as human being would not have needed to learn it from sufferings.’75 Thus earthly

66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75

JFY, 147 / SKS 16, 199. JP 2:1920, p. 361 / SKS 25, NB27:45, pp. 158–9. JP 2:1858, p. 322 / KJN 6, pp. 395–6 / SKS 22, NB14:80, p. 391. JP 2:1921, p. 361 / SKS 25, NB27:86, p. 201; JP 2:1922, p. 362 / SKS 25, NB27:87, pp. 201–4. JP 1:334, p. 139 / KJN 5, p. 374 / SKS 21, NB10:198, p. 362–3; JP 2:1858, p. 322 / KJN 6, p. 395 / SKS 22, NB14:80, p. 391; KJN 6, p. 243 / JP 3:2503, p. 75 / SKS 22, NB12:162, p. 241. UDVS, 197, 231 / SKS 8, 293, 332. JFY, 159, 198 / SKS 16, 208, 244; JP 2:1922, p. 362 / SKS 25, NB27:87, pp. 201–4. UDVS, 223 / SKS 8, 324; PC, 227 / SKS 12, 221. UDVS, 221, 240 / SKS 8, 323, 340. UDVS, 263 / SKS 8, 360, translation modified.

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existence was for him, as it is for every human being, a test, which he passed at every moment until his death on the cross, at which point he became ‘the perfect one’ who was taken up on high and exalted by God.76 According to Anti-Climacus, the life of the prototype can therefore be depicted in two ways, either infinitely close up in the context of actuality through the image of lowliness and abasement or infinitely far away in the context of completion as the object of faith in his loftiness, which always appears in the realm of worldliness and temporality inversely as lowliness and abasement as the basis for imitation.77 Christ thus stands both behind and ahead of human beings, behind in the sense of being more deeply pressed down into abasement and lowliness than any human being has ever been but ahead in being infinitely lifted up, propelling human beings forward and beckoning them on.78 In Anti-Climacus’s view, Christ willed to be the abased and lowly one in the form of a lowly servant. Thus it was not an accident or something that happened to him which might not have happened in a more just age but forms part of a ‘dialectical knot’ that cannot be untied until his second coming in glory.79 For Anti-Climacus, therefore, ‘one cannot become a believer except by coming to Christ in his state of abasement’.80 While regarding literal lowliness as ‘no unfortunate introduction to becoming a Christian’, Kierkegaard claims in an earlier, more lenient work in his own name that Christianity has never made literal lowliness synonymous with being a Christian, but no one can come to Christ or be a Christian except ‘in the character of or as a lowly person’ in the sense of being nothing in oneself before God.81 In other writings, however, he states that there is only one way truly to imitate Christ, namely to suffer for the doctrine, which will be external as well as internal in nature inasmuch as Christianity and the world are essentially opposed to one another, ensuring that anyone who expresses true Christian self-denial will encounter ‘double danger’ in the form of an inward struggle with oneself as well as outwardly with the world.82 While not claiming that one must become a martyr in order to be a Christian, Kierkegaard does suggest in the rigorous voice of Anti-Climacus that every true Christian should admit ‘that he has been let off far more easily than true Christians in the strictest sense’.83 The more one is or becomes a true Christian, however, to the same degree it will be inversely recognizable by the opposition one receives from the world. In emphasizing the imitation of Christ as prototype in his later religious writings Kierkegaard was undoubtedly influenced by the devotional writings of late medieval Catholic authors such as Johann Tauler and Thomas à Kempis as well as by Johann Arndt, Gerhard Tersteegen and Hans Adolph Brorson of the Protestant Pietist tradition, all of whom made the imitation of Christ a central theme in their works.84 Even so, he

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

UDVS, 256 / SKS 8, 354; PC, 181–4 / SKS 12, 181–4. PC, 184–5 / SKS 12, 184. PC, 238–9 / SKS 12, 232. PC, 33 / SKS 12, 47. PC, 24 / SKS 12, 39. CD, 53 / SKS 10, 62. JFY, 207 / SKS 16, 252; WL, 191–204 / SKS 9, 190–203; PC, 173, 212, 222 / SKS 12, 175, 208, 217. PC, 227 / SKS 12, 221. See Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness, 63–107; Peter Šajda, ‘Tauler: A Teacher in Spiritual Dietethics: Kierkegaard’s Reception of Johannes Tauler ’, in Kierkegaard and the Patristic and Medieval Traditions, ed. Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 4 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 265–87; Joel D. S. Rasmussen, ‘Thomas à Kempis: Devotio Moderna and Kierkegaard’s Critique of “Bourgeois-Philistinism”’, in Kierkegaard and the Patristic and Medieval Traditions, 289–98; Joseph Ballan, ‘Johann Arndt: The Pietist Impulse in Kierkegaard and Seventeenth Century Lutheran Devotional Literature’,

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was sharply critical of the ascetic forms of imitation practiced by the medieval monastic movement, which in his view merely copied (copierede) Christ in external forms rather than followed (efterfulgte) him, promoting the childish and naive belief that one could actually succeed in resembling him by engaging in such practices as withdrawing from the world, fasting, giving everything to the poor, flagellation or scourging, crawling on one’s knees, standing on one leg and receiving honour, admiration, extraordinary status and merit for it.85 However great its errors, Kierkegaard nevertheless thought that the conception of Christianity in the Middle Ages had ‘a decisive advantage’ over his own time in that it was conceived ‘along the lines of action, life, existence-transformation’ in contrast to the ‘professorial-scholarly Christianity’ of his day which substituted thinking about Christianity for the imitation of Christ.86 By 1852, therefore, he had concluded that asceticism, renunciation, celibacy and the like were still expressions of an infinite passion and Christianity’s heterogeneity with the world.87 The basic error of the Middle Ages is now seen to rest not in its monasticism and asceticism but in the secular mentality of the monks in parading as extraordinary Christians. Although finally calling for a movement ‘back to the monastery’ as ‘the first cause for Christianity to take up’, Kierkegaard nevertheless recognized that the secular mentality had won out so completely in his time that a return to the monastery was impossible, given the watchword of the day, ‘remain in the world’, which was ‘shrewdly understood’ to mean ‘that the kind of people who are able to express Christianity’s heterogeneity on the street, in the midst of the actuality of life, are no longer to be found’.88 For all Kierkegaard’s disappointment in Christendom’s failure to heed Christ’s requirement of imitation, however, Anti-Climacus’s second way of depicting Christ as prototype, namely in his distant loftiness from on high inversely through lowliness and abasement, presents him as drawing us to himself from on high after his death and ascension. Christ draws us to himself not by enticement but by helping us truly to become ourselves in order then to draw us to him in freedom by requiring a choice, which is the only way one self can truly be drawn to another. The choice in this instance, however, is not between Christ in his lowliness and Christ in his loftiness but as a composite of the two whose life

85

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in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions: Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 5: tome II (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 21–30; Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, ‘Søren Kierkegaard og Johann Arndt’, Kierkegaardiana 4 (1962): 7–17; Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, ‘Studies of Pietists, Mystics, and Church Fathers’, in Kierkegaard’s View of Christianity, ed. Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Boghandel A/S, 1978), 60–80; Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, ‘Pietism’, in Kierkegaard and Great Traditions, ed. Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 6 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Boghandel A/S, 1981), 173–222; Andrew J. Burgess, ‘Kierkegaard, Brorson, and Moravian Music’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Practice in Christianity, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 211–43; Andrew J. Burgess, ‘Kierkegaard, Moravian Missions, and Martyrdom’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Without Authority, 177–201; Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly, 4–5; Walsh Perkins, ‘At the Foot of the Altar’, 244–8. KJN 6, p. 252 / JP 2:1857, p. 321 / SKS 22, NB12:177, pp. 249–50; KJN 8, p. 184 / JP 2:1893, p. 340 / SKS 24, NB22:151, p. 186; KJN 8, p. 399 / JP 2:1905, p. 350 / SKS 24, NB24:115, pp. 393–4; KJN 8, p. 491 / JP 2:1909, p. 353 / SKS 24, NB25:67, pp. 483–4; KJN 8, p. 523 / JP 3:2760, p. 214 / SKS 24, NB25:100, pp. 513–14; JFY, 192–3 / SKS 16, 238–9; CUP, 401–6, 415–17, 463, 491–2, 508, 542–4 / SKS 7, 365–70, 378–80, 421, 445–6, 460, 492–5. JFY, 192–6 / SKS 16, 238–42. KJN 8, p. 523 / JP 3:2760, p. 214 / SKS 24, NB25:100, pp. 513–14. JP 3:2763, pp. 216–17 / SKS 25, NB30:26, pp. 403–5; JP 3:2764, pp. 217–18 / SKS 25, NB30:42, pp. 452–3; JP 3: 2765, p. 218 / SKS 2, NB31:107, p. 80.

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story may be summed up in a single shout: ‘See what a human being’ (Ecce homo).89 For Anti-Climacus, however, it is not admiration but imitation that is required in response to Christ as prototype: ‘An imitator is or strives to be what he admires’ whereas ‘an admirer keeps himself personally detached’, without any consciousness that the object of admiration ‘involves a claim upon him, to be or at least strive to be what is admired’.90 Only in the danger of actuality, in the situation of contemporaneity with Christ, does it become manifest whether one is an admirer or an imitator, for ‘Christ is the Truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only true explanation of what truth is’, that is, it is ‘not a sum of statements, not a definition etc., but a life,’ so that ‘being the truth is identical with knowing the truth’, which Christ would not have known if he had not been the truth.91 Observing that it is precisely on Ascension Day that the narrow way of Christ ought to be brought to mind, Kierkegaard views Christ’s ascension neither as a direct continuation of what went before nor as the end of the way but as the beginning of Christ’s triumph in taking his place at the right hand of God until he comes again at the end of time.92 While some doubt the ascension in accordance with the modern dictum that everything must be doubted, Kierkegaard suggests that not one of those whose lives bear the marks of imitation and persecution by forsaking all to follow Christ are among the doubters because their lives are too strenuous and too expended in daily sufferings to waste time on idle reasoning and doubt. Just as the ascension ‘disrupts or contravenes natural laws’ for doubters, who object to it for that reason, it also disrupts ‘the merely common grounds of comfort’ for imitators of Christ, who need the ascension in order to be able to endure their lives of suffering, and for that reason it is certain to them.93 For Anti-Climacus Christ’s existence on earth as the prototype makes the existence of the Christian church a parenthesis between his ascension and second coming, at which time every individual will be held accountable.94 In his view, Christ ‘certainly did not come to the world in order to judge . . . yet will come again to judge’ inasmuch as his life on earth ‘is the very judgment by which we shall be judged’ on whether we have loved him.95 Kierkegaard likewise claims that ‘by being love that was not loved’ Christ was ‘a judgment upon the world’.96 To the person who has loved Christ little, however, his word of judgement is also a word of comfort in that it is always possible to love him more in the future and thus to receive Christ’s forgiveness, which has the effect of loving forth love again in ‘the blessed recurrence of salvation in love’.97

FURTHER READING Barrett, Lee C. Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2013, 289–323. Gouwens, David J. Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Law, David R. Kierkegaard’s Kenotic Christology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Rae, Murray. Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation: By Faith Transformed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

PC, 170 / SKS 12, 173, translation modified. Cf. Jn 19.5. PC, 241, 249 / SKS 12, 234, 242. PC, 205 / SKS 12, 202. PC, 202 / SKS 12, 199; FSE, 65–6 / SKS 13, 87–8. FSE, 69 / SKS 13, 91. PC, 202 / SKS 12, 199. PC, 181 / SKS 12, 181. DCF, 127 / WA, 169 / SKS 12, 285. DCF, 134 / WA, 176 / SKS 12, 291.

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Justification: ‘The Article by Which the Church Stands or Falls’? DAVID J. GOUWENS

INTRODUCTION Justification by grace through faith has been a hallmark of Protestant theology since the Reformation. For Martin Luther (1483–1546), justification was the heart of the Gospel, the good news of God’s gracious acceptance of sinners, delivering them from the power of sin, death and the Devil. Justification was so central for Luther that, according to legend, he called it ‘the article by which the church stands or falls’.1 Would Søren Kierkegaard agree with seeing justification so significantly? I believe that the answer is ‘Yes, but’. Kierkegaard is firmly within the ‘Lutheran fold’ on justification, but as a contextual rather than doctrinal theologian he is always attentive to the abuses of doctrine. Beyond critique, however, he also offers correctives to those abuses that amount to what I wish to call a constructive ‘poetics’ of justification, displaying the importance of justification not only as an ‘article’ of faith but also as central to the movements of Christian existence.2 This poetics of justification displays how and when a person not only confesses but also acts out life as a ‘justified sinner’ and thus dramatizes that justification, God’s unmerited forgiveness in Christ, is indeed good news; at the same time, it is challenging news. Kierkegaard’s poetics dramatizes this good and challenging news for three different groups: those who complacently assume that faith does not require works or striving, those who trust in their own holiness and, finally, those who suffer from an anguished conscience. I will explore Kierkegaard’s critical and constructive rethinking of the doctrine of justification in the following sections. First, I will survey the historical background of the doctrine in Martin Luther as well as Pietism, and in Kierkegaard’s own theological education. Second, I will turn to For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!, texts that shed the greatest light on both his critical and constructive rethinking of justification, before

1

2

Luther himself did not use the phrase articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae, but compare Luther’s own 1536–7 Smalcald Articles, Part II, Article I, paragraph 5 on justification: ‘Nothing in this article can be conceded or given up’, in The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, trans. and ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, trans. Charles Arand et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 292. To speak of a ‘poetics’ of justification is not to reduce Kierkegaard’s reflections to aesthetic ‘poeticizing’ but to clarify how he revivifies justification through ‘imaginative construction’ of how justification actually functions in Christian existence.

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turning to his more fulsome understanding of Christ as redeemer and the forgiveness of sins in selected communion discourses. Despite the appearance of indifference or even hostility toward the doctrine, these texts will show how justification as God’s forgiveness of the sinner is central to his vision of the Christian life, at the same time that he also carefully relates justification to other Christian doctrinal themes, especially discipleship and sanctification. In the Conclusion, I will suggest briefly how Kierkegaard’s reflections on justification might constructively relate to recent ecumenical issues concerning justification and recent reflections on the theology of forgiveness.

I. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF A FOUNDATIONAL DOCTRINE ‘Justification’ (dikaiosyne) has traditionally been seen as the hallmark of Paul’s thought, finding expression especially in Romans and Galatians. The Greek term can be translated as either ‘righteousness’ or ‘justification’, and ‘righteousness of God’ (dikaiosyne theou) occurs in eight crucial passages in Romans (1.17; 3.5, 21, 22, 25, 26; and twice in 10.3). The good news of the Gospel is ‘the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek’ (Rom. 1.16). ‘For in [the Gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written “The one who is righteous will live by faith” ’ (Rom. 1.17, quoting Hab. 2.4). Paul summarizes justification with these words: ‘For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works prescribed by the law’ (Rom. 3.28). The reception of Paul’s understanding of justification has a long and storied history that continues to this day.3 To appreciate Kierkegaard’s understanding of justification, however, we can examine briefly two moments in that history: Martin Luther’s creative rethinking of justification, as well as the later adaptation of Luther by Pietism. Kierkegaard was shaped, if not directly by Luther, then by both Lutheran theology and Pietism, and their ways of discussing ‘justification’ will appear frequently in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Before Luther, a systematic ambiguity was built into the Western tradition’s theology of justification, speaking of it as both an event and also a process. As shaped by Augustine (354–430), justification was sometimes spoken of as an event of being ‘declared righteous’ in the present moment, but primarily it came to be seen as part of a process of being ‘made righteous’, emphasizing that one is ‘justified’ before God only when a person’s growth in infused virtues allows one to stand before God.4 In this approach, justification is sometimes conflated with sanctification. Luther breaks with this tradition, and while he is a complex and transitional figure, he sees justification as primarily an event in which sinful persons are ‘declared righteous’ or ‘reckoned righteous’ by God.5 Specifically, Luther departs from Augustine on the concept of ‘extrinsic justification’, seeing justification located outside the self, in Christ’s iustitia aliena (alien righteousness) that is imputed rather than imparted.6

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Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). See Heiko A. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000). On Augustine and the nature of Luther’s break with tradition, see McGrath, Iustitia Dei, especially 213, 222–3 and 232–3. Ibid., 226–7.

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Luther grounds his newfound understanding of justification in his reading of Paul. Already in his 1515/16 Romans lectures,7 Luther articulates the iustitia aliena, commenting on Rom. 4.7 (quoting Ps. 32.1-2), ‘Blessed are those whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered’, in connection with God ‘reckoning’ Abraham’s faith as righteousness apart from works (Rom. 4.3-6). Luther states, ‘ “Intrinsically” means as we are in ourselves . . . in our own estimation, and “extrinsically,” how we are before God and in his reckoning. [W]e are extrinsically righteous . . . not in and from ourselves and not by virtue of our own works, but only by God’s regarding us so.’8 For Luther, the individual’s standing coram Deo (before God) involves therefore two ways of seeing oneself: at once justified and a sinner (simul iustus et peccator). First, intrinsically, one is a sinner, reflected in Luther’s experience of the anguished conscience seen as ‘spiritual trial’ (Anfechtung): ‘the harrowing sense of paralysis or captivity before God’.9 From this anguish Luther’s only refuge was the theology of the cross, where God’s righteousness is revealed not as the righteousness that God possesses but as a gift from God, a righteousness revealed not in glory but in the cross of Christ, contradicting human preconceptions.10 Hence, the second sense of coram Deo is to see oneself not only as sinner but also as justified by virtue of Christ’s alien righteousness as a gift from God, so that one ‘stands before’ God’s ‘reckoning’, relying only on God’s work in Christ.11 We now reach the heart of Luther’s revolution, for the very core of justification is that a person is defined not in relation to oneself, to one’s works or ethics or faith, but in relation to Christ, for a person is justified only propter Christum not propter fidem: ‘faith is precisely that movement which takes a human extra se so that he trusts not in himself but in God’. Because the heart of justification is relation to Christ in faith, a person constantly ‘grounds himself in Christ and not in himself ’.12 For Luther the justified sinner therefore possesses what we may call double vision, seeing oneself simul iustus et peccator (at once justified and a sinner) ‘always a sinner, always a penitent, always justified’ and thus ‘ever to be justified anew’.13 As we will see, this pattern of defining the self as a justified sinner outside of oneself and therefore in relation to Christ, including continual recourse in faith to God’s forgiveness simul iustus et peccator, will be a central concern for Kierkegaard as well. The early Luther clearly stresses ‘forensic’ elements of justification as an event of the imputation of Christ’s alien, extrinsic righteousness grasped in hope. However, in contrast

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Ibid., 224. Martin Luther, Luther: Lectures on Romans, trans. and ed. Wilhelm Pauck. The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1951), 124. Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 120. Podmore traces Luther’s experience of the anguished conscience as ‘spiritual trial’ (Anfechtung) back to German devotional and mystical traditions that also provide background for Kierkegaard’s own critical engagement with Luther on Anfechtung. See also Simon D. Podmore, Struggling with God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2013), where he explores Anfechtung as ‘spiritual trial’ and ‘struggle’ in relation to Gelassenheit (release) in resting in God. McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 222. Martin Luther, ‘Heidelberg Disputation (1518)’, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull, foreword by Jaroslav Pelikan (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 30–49 [30–3]. See Craig Hinkson, ‘Luther and Kierkegaard: Theologians of the Cross’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 3, no. 1 (March 2001): 27–45. Luther, Lectures on Romans, 124. Daphne Hampson, Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 49, 50. McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 226, 227.

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to his colleague Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), the early Luther’s forensic justification uses far more personal – rather than legal or economic – images to describe the union of the believer with Christ, such as the famous image of marriage, and the ‘wonderful exchange’ or ‘happy exchange’ (froelich wechtzel) in which Christ gives ‘grace, life and salvation’ and takes on the soul’s ‘sins, death, and damnation’.14 In addition to Luther’s use of more personal images for justification, the emphasis on justification as an event, central as it is, does not lead him to a ‘monistic’ understanding of justification.15 Indeed, Luther, with the later Lutheran dogmatic tradition, intensely analysed how justification relates to a host of other theological concerns: If one is justified by faith alone, what is the place of works in the Christian life? How does law relate to gospel? How does faith relate to love?16 The Lutheran tradition sought mediating positions in these controversies. For example, regarding the place of works, the Formula of Concord clarified that good works will certainly flow from the believer’s appreciation of God’s grace but that such good works are not the basis of a person’s justification.17 Similarly, with regard to the law, the Formula of Concord affirmed three ‘uses’: to restrain sin; to convict the conscience (the ‘second’ or ‘theological’ use of the law); and the ‘third use’ of the law to guide Christian discipleship.18 Finally, on the relation of justifying faith and works of love, while Luther says that it is only by faith that one is justified; he also affirms that ‘faith is a living, busy, active, mighty thing which does good works without ceasing’.19 All of these issues in the Lutheran tradition will be relevant to Kierkegaard’s own rethinking of justification by grace through faith and its place within the Christian life: the centrality of the anguished conscience and spiritual trial; the theology of the cross; the ‘second use’ of the law to arouse consciousness of sin; the importance of utter reliance on God’s grace; the concept of simul iustus et peccator (at once justified and a sinner); and concerns for how justification by grace through faith relates to works and the uses of the law, and how justifying faith relates to works of love. Another profound influence on Kierkegaard’s understanding of justification is Pietism.20 The Pietists ‘shifted the theological focus away from forensic justification, the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, to the inner drama of regeneration, sanctification, and active love’, with the new life in Christ being both the origin and goal of the forgiveness of sins.21 The Pietists importantly rehabilitated the Epistle of James, which 14

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Martin Luther, ‘The Freedom of a Christian (1520)’, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Lull, 585–629 [603–4]; see also McGrath, Iustitia Dei, 238. The Finnish school of Luther interpretation, without denying the forensic elements in Luther, grounds them in the believer’s actual participation in the divine life through union with Christ. Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson, Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1998). Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Luther’s Moral Theology ’, in The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 120–35. Lee C. Barrett, ‘Faith, Works, and the Uses of the Law: Kierkegaard’s Appropriation of Lutheran Doctrine’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002), 77–109 (hereafter referred to by the siglum IKC: FSE/JFY). Formula of Concord, Article IV, in The Book of Concord, ed. Kolb and Wengert, 497–500, 574–81. Ibid., Article IV and Article VI, in The Book of Concord, ed. Kolb and Wengert, 502–3, 587–91. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 35 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1955–1986), 370, as quoted in Barrett, ‘Faith, Works, and the Uses of the Law’, 104. Christopher B. Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, ‘Pietism’, in Kierkegaard and Great Traditions, ed. Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 6 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1981), 173–222. Lee C. Barrett, ‘Kierkegaard and Biblical Studies’, A Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Jon Stewart, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 143–54 [151–2].

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Luther had scorned as ‘an epistle of straw’.22 Their recovery of James strongly influenced Kierkegaard’s own attempt to synthesize Luther’s reading of Paul on extrinsic justification with James’s insistence that faith must be active in works of love.23 This synthesis of Luther’s reading of Paul on extrinsic justification with James on faith active in love is especially evident in the forerunner of German Pietism, Johann Arndt (1551–1621).24 Arndt was important for Kierkegaard’s understanding of justification, for both agreed ‘that a person is only justified by the grace of God and not by righteous works’.25 At the same time, Arndt, like Kierkegaard later, also bemoaned ‘The effect of this doctrine . . . to mitigate the call to the imitation of Christ’.26 It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Kierkegaard’s own Lutheran and Pietist upbringing, immersed as the Kierkegaard family was in the piety of both Lutheran and Moravian congregations.27 Ironically, however, Luther himself was not widely studied in Kierkegaard’s Denmark, being known mostly through secondary literature.28 Indeed, Kierkegaard himself turned to Luther intensively only in 1847, primarily through his acquaintance with Luther’s sermons.29 Nonetheless, the young Kierkegaard early gained familiarity with Luther, and hence with justification. In the Royal Pastoral seminary in November 1840, Kierkegaard outlined a series of sermons, a number of which touch on themes related to faith, sin and forgiveness.30 Kierkegaard’s theological textbooks provided background in Lutheran doctrine, from a variety of theological standpoints, and his journals and notebooks show how his teachers, both moderate rationalists like Henrik Nikolai Clausen (1793–1877) and speculative theologians like Philipp Konrad Marheineke (1780–1846), presented the doctrine. Clausen, influenced not only by rationalism but also by Kant and Schleiermacher, was highly critical of the Lutheran dogmatic tradition for ‘formalizing’ doctrines into theological systems.31 Clausen says that Paul’s unique stress on ‘to declare to be righteous’ (dikaioun) ‘could seem not to have been originally Christian’, and ‘insofar as he added something’ to the ‘originally Christian’ Paul ‘departed from Chrn. teaching’. Paul nonetheless developed well ‘the basic Chrn. ideas’ against the value of works that do not reflect a ‘virtuous disposition’, and on the need for grace.32 Anticipating Kierkegaard, Clausen,

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Martin Luther, ‘Preface to the New Testament (1522, revised 1546)’, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Lull, 112–17 [117]. FSE, 16, 273n17. Lee C. Barrett, ‘Kierkegaard and Biblical Studies’, 151–2. Joseph Ballan, ‘Johann Arndt: The Pietist Impulse in Kierkegaard and Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Devotional Literature’, in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions: Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 5: tome II (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 21–30 [21]. Ibid., 27n 49, citing JFY, 193; see Johann Arndt, True Christianity, trans. Peter C. Erb, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 24. Ballan, ‘Johann Arndt’, 27. Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 10–12. On the later reception of Luther see Craig Q. Hinkson, ‘Will the Real Martin Luther Please Stand Up! Kierkegaard’s View of Luther vs. the Evolving Perceptions of the Tradition’, in IKC: FSE/JFY, 37–76; and David Yoon-Jung Kim and Joel D. S. Rasmussen, ‘Martin Luther: Reform, Secularization, and the Question of His “True Successor”’, in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions, Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart, 173–217. KJN 4, p. 357 / SKS 20, NB4:153, p. 357. Lee C. Barrett, ‘Kierkegaard’s Appropriation and Critique of Luther and Lutheranism’, in A Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Jon Stewart, 180–92 [180–1]. KJN 2, pp. 121–32 / SKS 18, HH:8–34, pp. 129–42. KJN 3, pp. 3–82 / SKS 19, Notebook 1, pp. 7–85. KJN 3, p. 54–5, 55 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:8, pp. 59–60.

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citing Augustine, denies that Paul on faith is in conflict with James on faith and works.33 Echoing Luther on faith, Clausen speaks of the Holy Spirit as being ‘communicated to hum. beings by means of faith’, who ‘takes possession of a person’s being and becomes the active principle in it’.34 Kierkegaard’s notes on Marheineke’s lectures that he attended in Berlin in 1841/2 reveal Kierkegaard’s early polemical stance against speculative theology’s efforts to reinterpret the doctrine of reconciliation or atonement (Versöhnung) in intellectualistic terms.35 As Kierkegaard remarks in his journal, Marheineke’s doctrine of revelation, at the heart of his speculative theology, represents well the ‘philosophical evaporation’ of Christian doctrine in which the finite is the infinite, with the emphasis on ‘infinite’.36 As Heiko Schulz observes, Marheineke is indirectly important for Kierkegaard’s developing reflection on justification, leading Kierkegaard to rethink the content of revelation in two ways: Christologically as the ‘God-human being’ and anthropologically as the ‘justified sinner’.37 In summary, Kierkegaard will be at once deeply indebted to these Lutheran and Pietist traditions while at the same time polemically poised against several theological currents arising from them. He will absorb the lessons of Lutheran scholasticism but avoid its overly technical vocabulary. He will critically engage Clausen’s rationalistic tendencies and speculative theology’s attempts to ‘evaporate’ justification into an abstract rather than individual ‘reconciliation’ between God and humanity. As Kierkegaard sees it, all of these theological positions, conservative and revisionist alike, lose sense of the point in speaking of ‘justification’: the individual seeing herself in terms of both consciousness of sin and consciousness of forgiveness, as a ‘justified sinner’. How then does one recapture what it might mean to exist as a ‘justified sinner’? Without denying the referential force of Christian doctrines, he seeks to clarify ‘poetically’ how those concepts shape the human heart. Specifically, Kierkegaard seeks to illuminate the passional context of justification, the ‘how’ involved in existing as a ‘justified sinner’. Kierkegaard addresses these concerns in his earlier literature, especially in Philosophical Fragments (1844), where he outlines what Robert C. Roberts has felicitously called Kierkegaard’s ‘grammar of Christian redemption’, comprising a set of interrelated concepts such as ‘sin, savior, deliverer, reconciler, judge, the fullness of time, a new person, conversion, repentance, rebirth, the moment’.38 We will focus our attention, however, upon Kierkegaard’s later writings where, given his later attention to Luther (especially Luther’s sermons), he shows in-depth reflection on justification.

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KJN 3, pp. 54–5 / SKS 19, Notebook 1:8, pp. 59–60[a]. KJN 3, p. 56 /SKS 19, Notebook 1:8, p. 61. See Kierkegaard’s Marheineke lecture notes: on Christology (KJN 3, pp. 260–73 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, pp. 264–76); on atonement (KJN 3, p. 273 / SKS 19, Notebook 9:1, pp. 276–7; continued in KJN 3, pp. 285– 90 / SKS 19, Notebook 10:8, pp. 288–93); and on grace (KJN 3, pp. 294–8 / SKS 19, Notebook 10:9, pp. 297–301). Marheineke engages in a running critique of David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874). KJN 3, pp. 239–40 / SKS 19, Notebook 8:52, p. 246. Heiko Schulz, ‘Marheineke: The Volatilization of Christian Doctrine’, in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries: Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 6: tome II (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 117–42 [135]. PF, 9–22, with original italics of key terms on PF, 15–21. Robert C. Roberts, Faith, Reason and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard’s ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 26–9. Roberts acknowledges his debt to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Paul L. Holmer for how he uses the concept of ‘grammar’.

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II. ‘TIMES ARE DIFFERENT’: FOR SELF-EXAMINATION AND JUDGE FOR YOURSELF! Kierkegaard’s engagement with ‘justification by faith’ is both critical and constructive. One important impetus for his critique is his increasing disgust with the state of doctrinal theology in his time, particularly when his former tutor Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–1884) published Christian Dogmatics in 1849.39 Martensen’s understanding of the dogmatic task as achieving an intellectually harmonious synthesis of Christian doctrine in its totality is evident in his discussion of ‘justification by faith’ as the ‘material principle of Protestantism’ representing ‘subjective’ Christianity in ‘reciprocal relation’ to Scripture as the ‘formal principle’ of Protestantism. This would be a good example of what Kierkegaard would judge to be Martensen’s excessively formalistic account of doctrine.40 Particularly lacking in Martensen, Kierkegaard believed, is any sense of ‘personal communication’, for in his Dogmatics ‘no one says “I” or speaks to a “you” ’.41 In contrast to Martensen, Kierkegaard seeks to recover the dialogic voice, the recovery of the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of personal discourse, that is the proper home for speaking of sin and forgiveness.42 Kierkegaard believes, however, that Martensen’s formalist objectivism is only the symptom of a deeper malaise: the divorce of ‘justification’ from personal existence, the breakdown of a sense of what Kierkegaard considers ‘the central dialectic of Christian existence’: that in forgiveness of sin by Christ ‘the consciousness of sin is taken away and replaced by its opposite, the consciousness of forgiveness’.43 While the language of justification is still used, it is disconnected from any awareness of sin or the need for forgiveness. Rejecting Martensen’s systematizing of doctrine in favour of a Christian rhetoric of upbuilding, Kierkegaard’s ‘second authorship’ from 1847 to 1851 focuses upon specific Christian theological issues that relate to the doctrine of justification but For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! prove particularly fruitful.44 In these books Kierkegaard analyses how the Lutheran sola fide and grace have been abused by being separated from the ‘anguished conscience’, earnestness, action and other decisive hallmarks of Christian existence: striving, works and especially discipleship as following after Christ.45 These books also clarify his constructive response to that breakdown, the need to recover a sense of Christ as prototype as well as redeemer. Near the beginning of For Self-Examination, with its subtitle ‘Recommended to the Present Age’, Kierkegaard announces his theme: ‘Times are different . . . and different

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Hans Lassen Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, trans. William Urwick (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1866). Ibid., § 21, pp. 30–1; § 24, p. 42. KJN 6, p. 156 / SKS 22, NB12:26, p. 158. Four years before Martensen published his Christian Dogmatics, Kierkegaard, reflecting on Christian communication, wrote in his journal, ‘A new science must be introduced: Christian rhetoric. It is to be constructed ad modum Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The whole of dogmatics, especially what it has now developed into, is a misunderstanding.’ KJN 2, p. 217 / SKS 18, JJ:305, p. 236. Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 36, citing UDVS, 246. Kierkegaard published For Self-Examination under his own name in 1851. He wrote Judge for Yourself! in 1851–2; his brother Peter published it in 1876. On Kierkegaard’s influence on how Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) later rearticulated an attack on ‘cheap grace’ in his 1937 book Discipleship, see Matthew D. Kirkpatrick, Attacks on Christendom in a World Come of Age: Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and the Question of ‘Religionless Christianity’, foreword Geffrey B. Kelly, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011).

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times have different requirements.’46 The problem with the doctrine of justification by grace through faith is not with the doctrine, since Kierkegaard affirms that ‘Lutheran doctrine is excellent, is the truth’.47 He attacks not the doctrine but how ‘the present age’ in contrast to Luther’s time abuses justification by faith. It is helpful to think of Kierkegaard as a contextual doctrinal thinker, interested in recovering the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of personal discourse. In contrast to Martensen, in For SelfExamination and Judge for Yourself! Kierkegaard presents himself not as a church teacher but a person ‘without authority’ who simply observes what ‘Christianity’s requirement’ is: ‘your life should express works as strenuously as possible; then one thing more is required – that you humble yourself and confess: But my being saved is nevertheless grace’.48 He invites a tone of intimacy with his reader. He confesses, and invites his reader’s confession: ‘I confess my weakness, and even to you, my reader, do I not? Then you will also confess yours . . . Ah, we who still call ourselves Christian are from the Christian point of view so pampered, so far from being what Christianity does indeed require of those who want to call themselves Christian, dead to the world.’49 Kierkegaard’s implied audience is ‘the present age’ of the subtitle, and he addresses them not as ‘you’ but as ‘we’. From this invitation to intimacy, Kierkegaard employs three rhetorical and hermeneutical strategies aimed at personal discourse that will both expose the abuses and delineate the proper contexts for speaking of justification by faith: a hermeneutic of inward deepening with a focus on the Epistle of James; a hermeneutic of the cross and discipleship with a focus on the gospels, including the passion narratives; and a hermeneutic of grace and gratitude which ironically does not refer to the Pauline texts on justification while at the same time affirming their teaching. By highlighting James and the gospels, he does not deny the Lutheran understanding of Paul as testimony to extrinsic justification but contextualizes Paul within this broader canonical context.

Hermeneutic of Inward Deepening Kierkegaard employs this first strategy at the very beginning of For Self-Examination: ‘What Is Required in Order to Look at Oneself with True Blessing in the Mirror of the Word?’50 Kierkegaard strategically appeals to the authority of Luther: ‘His life expressed works – let us never forget that – but he said: A person is saved by faith alone.’51 The danger Luther countered was not works themselves but in seeing works as meritorious. So great was this danger that Luther even ‘shoved aside’ the Apostle James.52 But ‘times are different’. Now a ‘secular mentality’ ‘wants to become Christian as cheaply as possible’ and so uses Luther’s ‘faith alone’ (sola fide) to reinterpret Luther as wanting ‘to be free from works as far as possible’.53 How then might we remedy this malaise? First, Kierkegaard appeals to Luther’s famous remark that ‘faith is a restless thing’ to urge inward deepening and to recover Luther’s

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FSE, 15. FSE, 24. FSE, 17, original italics. FSE, 11–12. FSE, 7–51.The text is Jas 1.22-25, ‘But be doers of the Word, and not only hearers of it, whereby you deceive yourselves’, with its image of the mirror of the Word. FSE, 13. Kierkegaard uses this hermeneutic of inward deepening also in Part I of Judge for Yourself!, ‘Becoming Sober’. JFY, 93–143. FSE, 16. FSE, 16, 273n17. FSE, 16.

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sense of ‘spiritual trial’ (Anfechtung).54 The restlessness of faith, as Luther knew, seeks to be ‘recognizable in [one’s] life’, and so Kierkegaard calls for ‘a hero of faith or a witness to the truth’ who will be ‘like Luther in a cloister cell or in a remote room . . . a solitary person in spiritual trial [Anfægtelse]’.55 Second, because ‘faith is a restless thing’, and reflecting Pietist interest in James’s counsel to be ‘doers of the Word, and not only hearers of it’, the place of works and hence the Epistle of James must now be accentuated ‘not for works against faith – . . . but for faith, in order, if possible, to cause the need for grace to be felt deeply . . . and, if possible, to prevent grace, faith and grace as the only redemption and salvation, from being taken totally in vain’.56 The problem then, once more, is not the doctrine, but because ‘I am . . . a cunning fellow’, the ‘minor premise’ of works in Lutheran doctrine needs to emphasized, not to make it ‘the major premise’ or to disparage grace and faith but because I am cunning.57 Hence, with James, in order to confront this cunning, we must learn to be ‘not only hearers of the Word but doers of it’58, reading Scripture as a ‘mirror’ and as a ‘letter from the beloved’.59

Hermeneutic of the Cross and Discipleship Kierkegaard employs his second strategy to explore Christ as prototype as well as redeemer, giving concrete content to his attack on ‘faith without works’ by stressing the gospels, especially the passion narratives. Here again, with regard to faith and justification, Kierkegaard does not reject the Pauline message of justification by faith but shows how it resides within the broader context of Christ as prototype as well as redeemer. In ‘Christ Is the Way’ in For Self-Examination and ‘Christ as the Prototype’ in Judge for Yourself!, Kierkegaard uses the Acts of the Apostles and the gospels, respectively, to emphasize Christ’s role as prototype for imitation as well as redeemer.60 In ‘Christ Is the Way’ in For Self-Examination, Kierkegaard ironically uses the scriptural text for Ascension Day (Acts 1.1-12) celebrating Christ’s victory. He reminds his reader, however, that the way of Christ to his Ascension Day victory is the ‘narrow way’ of ‘poverty, lowliness, abasement’, which Kierkegaard narrates from the gospels, from the very beginning of Christ’s life to his death on the cross.61 To follow his way to victory is to choose voluntarily this narrow way of imitation, a following that will mean sharing in Christ’s rejection by the world, not simply inward suffering. Similarly, Kierkegaard uses Mt. 6.24-34, ‘No one can serve two masters’, as his text for ‘Christ as the Prototype’ in Judge for Yourself!. In this discourse, Kierkegaard again echoes Luther’s theology of the cross by juxtaposing the star of Christ’s birth, this ‘superhuman glory’, to the cross. ‘[T]he essentially Christian always places opposites together’ and so ‘the glory [of the star] is not directly known as glory but, just the reverse, by inferiority,

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FSE, 17–25. FSE, 19. Kierkegaard later became much more critical of Luther himself as the source of this spiritual malaise, seeing Luther’s universalizing of his own experience of anguish and grace as leading him to an undialectical affirmation of grace apart from striving, thus paving the way for the present age’s lack of spirit. See, e.g., JP 3:2544, pp. 95–7 / SKS 27, Papir 456, pp. 567–9. FSE, 24, original italics. FSE, 24–5. Hinkson, ‘Will the Real Martin Luther Please Stand Up!’, 42n8. FSE, 25. FSE, 25–51, 26–35. FSE, 53–70; JFY, 153–215. Kierkegaard employs the gospel narratives centrally also in Practice in Christianity. FSE, 53–70.

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debasement’.62 Significantly, Kierkegaard again cites Luther in support of the idea that the Christian will experience suffering in this world: ‘Luther, the superb teacher of our Church, continually points out as belonging to true Christianity: to suffer for the doctrine, to do good and suffer for it, and that suffering in this world is inseparable from being a Christian in this world.’63 Near the conclusion of ‘Christ as the Prototype’ in Judge for Yourself!, Kierkegaard draws out explicitly the implications for justification by faith, returning to the theme of ‘Times are different’ that he sounded at the beginning of For Self-Examination. ‘The Middle Ages conceived of Christianity along the lines of action, life, existencetransformation’ but fell into two errors. First, it thought that by itself ‘entering the monastery was supposed to be true imitation. This was an error’. But the worse error was the following: ‘[T]hey came up with the idea of meritoriousness, thought that they earned merit before God through their good works.’64 ‘Then Luther appears’ who declares this salvation by good works to be ‘the sure road either to presumptuousness . . . or to despair’. ‘But let us not forget, Luther did not therefore abolish imitation.’65 ‘Present-day Christendom . . . adheres to Luther; it is another matter whether Luther could acknowledge it.’66 Once more we see that Kierkegaard does not criticize the Lutheran dogmatic tradition on the centrality of justification by faith or Christ as redeemer. His corrective is not doctrinal but to clarify the context of justification. Justification by faith and Christ as redeemer presuppose a context of striving and willingness to ‘suffer for the doctrine’.67

Hermeneutic of Grace and Gratitude Kierkegaard’s third hermeneutical strategy focuses upon Christ as redeemer. As we have seen, Kierkegaard puts forward Christ’s role as prototype, not to reduce the importance of Christ as redeemer but to redress the balance. He reminds his reader that ‘we continually call to mind . . . that Jesus Christ is not only the prototype but is also the Redeemer’.68 Indeed, ‘The primary function of the prototype is to teach us how greatly we are in need of grace’.69 Hence, the role of Christ as prototype does not stand by itself, but serves the Gospel of atonement and grace, Christ as redeemer. So, too, this third hermeneutical strategy does not supersede the hermeneutic of the cross and discipleship but interweaves with it, evident in the prayer to Christ that opens Part II of Judge for Yourself! on ‘Christ as the Prototype’.70 This prayer depicts the follower moving from Christ as prototype to Christ as redeemer and then back to Christ as prototype again: Christ is ‘both the prototype and the Redeemer’ and ‘in turn both the Redeemer and the prototype’ ‘so that when the striving one droops under the prototype, crushed, almost despairing, the Redeemer raises him up again; but at the same moment you are again the prototype so that he may 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

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JFY, 161. JFY, 169. JFY, 192. JFY, 192–3. JFY, 193. JFY, 201–9. JFY, 159. Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 237, quoted in Murray Rae, ‘Kierkegaard, Barth, and Bonhoeffer: Conceptions of the Relation between Grace and Works’, in IKC: FSE/JFY, ed. Perkins, 143–67 [156]. JFY, 147.

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be kept in the striving’71. This movement is not, as Kierkegaard would charge against Martensen’s dogmatics, an abstract conceptual dialectical movement that resolves into a higher unity. It is rather a dialectical movement in time and in the individual’s existence, describing the ongoing dynamics of how the disciple relates to Christ. A helpful way to see how Kierkegaard thinks of this dynamic movement of the individual in relation to Christ as prototype and redeemer is to view it in relation to Lutheran concepts of the uses of the law.72 First, departing from Lutheran tradition, it is not only the Decalogue but also Christ as prototype who functions as the ‘second use’ or ‘convicting use’ of the law. As we saw in the opening prayer from Judge for Yourself!: ‘one droops under the prototype, crushed, almost despairing’.73 In an important journal entry, Kierkegaard clarifies his understanding of law and gospel, showing how grace is more rigorous than law: ‘Christianity is gospel – – but, but, nevertheless Christ declares that he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it, make the law more rigorous, as in the Sermon on the Mount.’74 Christ as prototype fulfills the law, making ‘the law more rigorous’, but Christ also abolishes it. As Sylvia Walsh puts it, ‘Through his fulfillment of the law . . . [Christ] ransoms humanity from law to grace by presenting himself as the prototype who dialectically causes persons to flee to grace. Thus he enables one to “die to the prototype”, the law, and the works righteousness that require individuals to resemble the prototype by their own effort.’75 This second function of the law (and for Kierkegaard, Christ as the fulfiller and abolisher of the law) importantly addresses the commonly expressed fear that in emphasizing the striving of discipleship, Kierkegaard subtly introduces works-righteousness, that one somehow earns justification by virtue of one’s striving as a precondition for grace. Against this, however, Kierkegaard states that in our striving we will be ‘deeply humbled before God’ as one ‘sees [these ‘good deeds’] transformed into something miserable and base’.76 Even worse, the striver realizes that the ideal of ‘serving one master’ is impossible, for I can always do more, and worst of all, I realize that before God, when I have come the furthest that I am able, ‘I have not come one inch, not one millionth of an inch, closer to God than the person who never strove, indeed, than the one who strove with all his might for the opposite’.77 But it is neither our striving nor our anguish at failing that is a ‘work’ one does in order to be justified. As Murray Rae points out, in this discourse on ‘Christ as the Prototype’ in Judge for Yourself!, the proclamation of reconciliation is not only Kierkegaard’s last word in this discourse78 but also his first: ‘Atonement and grace enter into Kierkegaard’s discussion of the text of Mt. 6.24 [‘No one can serve two masters’] from the beginning of the discourse.’79 As Kierkegaard puts it in a journal entry, ‘Heterodoxly one may say that conversion precedes and conditions the forgiveness of sins; orthodoxly one

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

JFY, 147. I am indebted on this point to Lee C. Barrett, ‘Faith, Works, and the Uses of the Law’. JFY, 147. JP 2:1484, p. 173 / KJN 8, p. 314 / SKS 24, NB 23:220, p. 313; see also Walsh, Living Christianly, 153. Walsh, Living Christianly, 159, citing JP 1:349, p. 146 / KJN 6, p. 350 / SKS 22, NB14:7, p. 346. JFY, 154; see Barrett, ‘Faith, Works and Uses of the Law’, 82–91. JFY, 152. JFY, 209. Rae, ‘Kierkegaard, Barth, and Bonhoeffer’, 156. On atonement, see JFY, 152; on grace, see JFY, 153.

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may say: the forgiveness of sins precedes conversion and strengthens men truly to be converted.’80 Thus, far from intending to engender a sense that one can justify oneself either by striving or by one’s anguish at failing, the rhetorical force of the second use is to lead one to realize that one ‘can contribute nothing to our salvation’.81 The break with immanence is radical, a type of death and resurrection.82 Christ the redeemer thus turns to the striver in utter grace. In the words of the opening prayer to ‘Christ as Prototype’, ‘when the striving one droops under the prototype, crushed, almost despairing, the Redeemer raises him up again’.83 Grace both takes away one’s concern about salvation, giving assurance, and also motivates the Christian striver to further works of imitation. The central role for grace as the assurance of salvation is especially clear in a journal entry: ‘Grace’ takes away this concern [that my salvation is linked to the condition of fulfilling the requirement of the law] and says: Only believe – then eternal salvation is assured to you. But no more, not the slightest abatement of the law’s demand; now you are to begin to realize precisely this. But there will be rest and peace in your soul, for your eternal salvation is assured to you if only you believe.84 Hence, with reliance on Christ as redeemer one then returns to Christ as prototype. In the words of the opening prayer to ‘Christ as the Prototype’, ‘but at the same moment you are again the prototype so that he may be kept in the striving’.85 Just as Christ assumes aspects of the ‘first use’ of the law, here Christ as prototype assumes aspects of the ‘third use’ of the law, as the prototype for continued striving.86 In a journal entry on law and gospel, Kierkegaard articulates well his sense of the ‘third use’: It is said that the Reformation affirmed ‘grace’ in contrast to law . . . But here Luther probably did not take enough care. The norm is: for every higher degree of grace, law must also be made more rigorous in inwardness – otherwise the whole secular mentality rushes forward and takes ‘grace’ in vain. And this is precisely what happened in the Reformation.87 It is important to notice two points about this striving based upon grace. First, it is not a return to law or works-righteousness as the basis for one’s salvation. Rather, it is a striving following Christ as prototype that is born of grace and gratitude. This ‘third use’ of the law, as the mark of a ‘higher degree of grace’, freed from the condemning function

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JP 2:1206, p. 46 / SKS 20, NB:55, p. 51; see also JP 2:1216, p. 49 / SKS 27, Papir 410, p. 489, citing the Augsburg Confession, Article XXV, that ‘it must be revealed to a man how great a sinner he is’, in The Book of Concord, 72–5. Barrett, ‘Faith, Works, and the Uses of the Law, 108. Ibid., 97; FSE, 74–6, 81. JFY, 147. JP 2:1475, pp. 166–7 [166] / KJN 6, pp. 387–8 [387] / SKS 22, NB14:65, pp. 382–4 [383]. See also Walsh, Living Christianly, 154. JFY, 147. Recall that the ‘third use’ of the law, which was somewhat ambiguously affirmed by Luther, gained formal acceptance in the Formula of Concord, Article IV and Article VI, in The Book of Concord, ed. Kolb and Wengert, 502–3, 587–91. See also David Yoon-Jung Kim, ‘John Calvin: Kierkegaard and the Question of the Law’s Third Use’, in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Modern Traditions: Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart, 81–110. JP 2:1484, p. 173 / KJN 8, p. 314 / SKS 24, NB23:220, pp. 313–14 [314].

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of the law and from works-righteousness, leads to renewed striving, discipleship and imitation, but now under grace it is striving done in gratitude. Second, as in Luther, the disciple’s flight to the redeemer, to justification that leads again to a renewed striving, is a continuing return to the grace of justification, simul iustus et peccator. From awareness of failing to fulfill the law and to follow Christ as prototype, one daily turns again to the redeemer. This is clear in Kierkegaard’s observations on ‘Christian perfection’ when he writes, ‘I should not say that it is a perfection of striving but specifically that it is the deep recognition of the imperfection of one’s striving, and precisely because of this a deeper and deeper consciousness of the need for grace, not grace for this or that, but the infinite need infinitely for grace.’88 Most importantly, this renewed striving in discipleship is done in the spirit of ‘a gracious jest’.89 Kierkegaard portrays this renewed striving as ‘jest’ with his famous image of little Ludvig who, guided by his mother, strives and strives and thinks that he is the one who pushes the stroller, while actually it is his mother who pushes it. Kierkegaard writes, ‘[L]et your work be your enjoyment’, ‘something God has thought of to delight you’.90 In this spirit, echoing Gal. 3.25, Kierkegaard continues, ‘the Law was abrogated and jest was assigned its place in the kingdom of heaven; thus we are no longer under the strict disciplinarian but under the Gospel.’91 This is earnest jest, however, for ‘following [følge efter] Christ, of imitation [Efterføgelse]’ is in another sense no jest and neither is it ‘poetry’ for ‘[w]hat is crucial in Christianity is: . . . to suffer because one adheres to God – or, as it is called, to suffer for the doctrine – the true imitation of Christ’.92 In summary, this following after Christ in the ‘true imitation’ of suffering arises from grace and results in gratitude. As Kierkegaard writes in his journal, ‘Imitation or discipleship does not come first, but “grace”; then imitation follows as a fruit of gratitude . . . [I]n the relationship to Christ the problem is that of simply becoming spiritual enough really to grasp how infinitely much Christ has done for me, what a terrible evil sin is, and what a superlative good eternal salvation is.’93

III. THE ATONER AND THE FORGIVEN: THE COMMUNION DISCOURSES ON JUSTIFICATION For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! by no means exhaust Kierkegaard’s extended reflections on justification. His 1848–51 communion discourses add much to our

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JP 2:1482, pp. 170–2 [170] / KJN 8, pp. 188–90 [188] / SKS 24, NB22:159, pp. 190–2 [190]. On Kierkegaard’s reflections on the simul iustus et peccator in relation to neighbour-love, see WL, ‘Love Hides a Multitude of Sins’, 280–99, and Andrew J. Burgess, ‘Kierkegaard’s Concept of Redoubling and Luther’s Simul Justus’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Works of Love, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999), 39–55. The simul iustus et peccator is relevant as well to Kierkegaard’s ‘Does a Human Being Have the Right to Let Himself Be Put to Death for the Truth?’ in Two Ethical-Religious Essays (1849) (WA, 47–89); Lee C. Barrett, ‘Kierkegaard on the Problem of Witnessing While Yet Being a Sinner ’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Without Authority, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007), 147–75. JFY, 186. JFY, 185. Note, too, how this parallels Luther’s own sense of the freedom of the Christian, released from the burden of sin and guilt, yet now free to love God and neighbour. Luther, ‘The Freedom of a Christian (1520)’, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Lull, 585–629. JFY, 186. JFY, 187. JP 2:1886, p. 338 / KJN 8, p. 128 / SKS 24, NB22:52, pp. 131–2.

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understanding of how he thinks of Christ’s atoning work as redeemer as well as how sinners receive forgiveness. Here, too, we should be aware of Kierkegaard’s literary craft using an implied author and implied reader. While Kierkegaard as always writes ‘without authority’, these communion discourses are in effect sermons inviting persons to the Friday Communion service. In contrast to For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!, they address a different implied reader, not one who needs to be reminded about the call to discipleship but a reader whom Kierkegaard assumes is already in a stance of selfexamination and sorrow over sin.94 Christ’s role as ‘The High Priest’ (Heb. 4.15) in Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849) is particularly illuminating as it explores the ground for justification in Christ’s atoning work who as priest and sacrifice in his death on the cross makes repayment or satisfaction for sin, as our substitute.95 Kierkegaard conceives this not in abstract terms but in strongly personal and individual terms, as Christ’s work pro me. What is the ‘Atoner’ but a substitute who puts himself entirely in your place and in mine, and what is the comfort of the atonement but this, that the substitute, making satisfaction, puts himself completely in your place and in my place! . . . I stand saved by the side of this other person, by the side of him, my Atoner, who entirely put himself in my place.96 Kierkegaard echoes Luther’s and Pietism’s highly personal images of the believer’s relation to Christ, suggesting the ‘wonderful’ or ‘joyous exchange’ (froelich wechtzel) that Luther uses to speak of the believer’s relation to Christ.97 In using the language of satisfaction and substitution, Kierkegaard here comes closest to a ‘forensic’ understanding of justification, not that Kierkegaard attempts to explain thereby the mystery of atonement, or use the ‘forensic’ legal or economic images suggested especially by Melanchthon’s reading of ‘imputation’, but that he understands Christ’s work as sacrifice and substitute in strongly realist terms. Kierkegaard never dissolves Christology into soteriology; Christ is, for Kierkegaard, always Christ extra nos, and salvation is always pro nobis and pro me. With Lutheran Eucharistic theology Kierkegaard emphasizes the real presence of Christ, ‘consubstantially’, a presence in, with and under the bread and wine, which remain bread and wine, at the Communion table.98 Another central image for Christ’s work of atonement is presented in the second of his Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1851) on the theme of ‘Love will hide a multitude of sins’ (1 Pet. 4.8).99 Echoing again the image of the ‘wonderful exchange’, Kierkegaard speaks of sin that ‘is hidden like what is hidden at the bottom of the sea . . .

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The thirteen communion discourses can be found, in chronological order, in CD, 247–300; WA, 109–44; PC, 145–56; and WA, 161–88. Sylvia Walsh has helpfully gathered and newly translated the communion discourses, with a splendid introduction to their setting in the intimacy of the Friday Communion service in Copenhagen’s Vor Frue Kirke and a helpful account of their theological themes. Søren Kierkegaard, Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), hereafter referred to by the siglum DCF. Quotations will be from DCF, followed by the corresponding WA page citations. 95 DCF, 91–9; WA, 113–24. 96 DCF, 99; WA, 123. 97 Luther, ‘The Freedom of a Christian (1520)’, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Lull, 585–629 [603]. The implied ‘joyous exchange’ in Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christ lends itself well to aspects of the Finnish interpretation of Luther. 98 DCF, ‘Introduction’, 23–5. 99 DCF, 136–43; WA, 179–88. Kierkegaard published the two 1851 communion discourses just five weeks before For Self-Examination and on the same day as On My Work as an Author. Kierkegaard saw these two

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so that sin is transformed into purity [Is. 1.18] and you yourself dare to believe yourself justified and pure – that only he can do, the Lord Jesus Christ, whose love hides a multitude of sins’.100 Christ hides sin ‘quite literally’, for ‘Jesus Christ covers your sin with his holy body’ ‘just as the concerned hen gathers her chicks under her wings’ (Mt. 23.37).101 His death – again, ‘quite literally’ – covers your sin, and unlike the concerned hen, who in death can no longer protect her chicks, just because Christ hides it with ‘his death’, it is ‘impossible for you to be deprived of your hiding place’.102 So if ‘justice were then to fly into a rage’, that penalty ‘has indeed been paid, his death is your hiding place’.103 In addition to portraying Christ’s atoning work, the communion discourses also display how sinners receive forgiveness. Immediately following the 1849 high priest discourse Kierkegaard turns to a discourse on ‘The Tax Collector’ (Lk. 18.13), one of Kierkegaard’s ‘prototypes’ meant to direct our attention to us as readers. The tax collector discourse directly addresses the question of who is ‘justified’.104 In Luke’s parable, the tax collector stood before God but, in contrast to the Pharisee, ‘stood far off and would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast and said: God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ (Lk. 18.13). But then comes the Kierkegaardian reversal: ‘the picture is inverted’, for ‘The tax collector went home to his house justified’ rather than the Pharisee.105 Reflecting the theology of the cross, the humble tax collector – not the Pharisee – is exalted, for it is ‘the downcast eye’ that ‘sees God, and the downcast eye is the uplifting of the heart’ in a faith that ‘is against the understanding’.106 Kierkegaard then makes explicit for his reader the link between the anguished conscience and justification: ‘For self-accusation is the possibility of justification’.107 ‘[Y]et at the altar is the justification’.108 Kierkegaard ends: ‘when you return to your house from the altar . . . be assured that you found justification at the altar, that the visit was a joy and blessing for you.’109 In the discourse on the tax collector we see perfectly portrayed the stance of a person who is justified by grace through faith. Kierkegaard pictures the passions that shape how one receives God’s forgiveness and justification. He portrays justification in terms of the ‘how’ of that faith, a humility that brings nothing but a desire for God’s help, yet in being lifted up receives God’s justification. In the third and final 1849 discourse, immediately following the tax collector discourse, Kierkegaard presents a second prototype, ‘The Woman Who Was a Sinner’ (Lk. 7.47).110 Here, too, the focus is on the all-sufficiency of Christ’s work of satisfaction, for the woman’s viewpoint is, ‘ “I am capable of literally nothing at all, he [Christ] is capable of absolutely everything”.’111 In her utter reliance on Christ, her sins are not only

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communion discourses as the ‘decisive point of rest’ of his entire authorship, expressing ‘the content of my life’. DCF, 125–6; WA, 165–6; WA, ‘Historical Introduction’, xvii–xviii. DCF, 140; WA, 185. DCF, 140–1, original italics; WA, 185. DCF, 141, original italics; WA, 186. DCF, 141–2; WA, 186. DCF, 100–7; WA, 125–34. DCF, 105, 104, original italics, quoting Lk. 18.14; WA, 131. DCF, 105, original italics; WA, 132. DCF, 105, original italics; WA, 132. DCF, 106; WA, 133. DCF, 106; WA, 133. DCF, 108–15; WA, 135–44. The figure of the woman who was a sinner (Lk. 7.36-50) occurs repeatedly in Kierkegaard’s writings and is a rich resource for further exploration of a theology of forgiveness. DCF, 111; WA, 139–40.

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‘forgiven’ but also ‘forgotten’.112 Reflecting the theme that we saw in the 1851 discourse, Christ’s atoning work ‘hiding a multitude of sins’, the opening prayer of this discourse addresses Christ: ‘help us so that we might love you much, increase the love, inflame it, purify it’, for ‘you are indeed love in such a way that you yourself love forth the love that loves you’.113 The woman’s test, Kierkegaard continues, is ‘to love her Savior more than her sin’.114 Here forgiveness and love intertwine, for ‘turn it however you will’ she is ‘blessed in that her many sins were forgiven her, and . . . blessed in that she loved much’.115 However, this raises a question. Does Kierkegaard here reintroduce merit? Is it perhaps not one’s works or one’s striving but one’s love that now is the condition to receive grace?116 Kierkegaard addresses this concern two years later in another discourse on the theme ‘But [the one] to whom little is forgiven loves little’ (Lk 7.47), a verse in this same narrative of the woman who was a sinner.117 To this question whether love is itself merit Kierkegaard answers ‘no’, citing the parable of the two debtors in this passage (Lk. 7.41-3), which describes the ‘blessed recurrence of salvation in love’, invoking again the theme of ‘love loving forth’: ‘First you love much, and much is then forgiven you – oh, and see, love then gets even stronger; this, that so much has been forgiven you, it loves forth love once again, and you love much because much has been forgiven you!’118 Far from love earning merit, love excludes merit altogether, for the ‘blessed recurrence of salvation in love’ prevents one from entering ‘the hapless region of merit’.119 Striking in the communion discourses is how Kierkegaard maintains classic themes of ‘solafideism’, the all-sufficiency of the grace of God’s love in Christ’s work of substitution and satisfaction, ‘loving forth love’ that not only forgives but also forgets sin, reconciling sinners with God in their own responsive love. Here perhaps we see best how justifying faith leads to works of love, both in gratitude and in the ‘blessed recurrence of love’ that, apart from all questions of merit, in turn leads to the reduplication of love toward one’s neighbour.120 It is not surprising then that Kierkegaard saw the communion discourses as ‘the resting point’ of his entire authorship, for they unite the atonement of Christ with the imitation of Christ, Christ the Redeemer and Atoner with Christ the Exemplar and Prototype, the forgiveness of sin with the contrite consciousness and confession of sin . . . [T]he thrust of the authorship as a whole is clearly toward reconciliation with God, which is accomplished through the death and atonement of Christ and made true in the life of each person individually by loving Christ much and remaining in communion with him in one’s daily life.121

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DCF, 113; WA, 142. DCF, 108; WA, 137. DCF, 114; WA, 143. DCF, 114; WA, 143. See DCF, ‘Introduction’, 31–2. DCF, 127–35, 133; WA, 167–77. This is the first of the Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1851). DCF, 134; WA, 176. Note, too, the stringency of love’s judgement against those who ‘love little’. For those who love little, the gospel of forgiveness becomes, in the negative sense, law, and it becomes judgement. See DCF, ‘Introduction’, 30–1, and WA, 275–6. DCF, 123; WA, 176. On the ‘reduplication’ of love toward neighbour, see again WL, ‘Love Hides a Multitude of Sins’, 280–99. Sylvia Walsh Perkins, ‘At the Foot of the Altar: Kierkegaard’s Communion Discourses as the Resting Point of His Authorship’, in The Theologically Formed Heart: Essays in Honor of David J. Gouwens, ed. Warner M. Bailey, Lee C. Barrett III and James O. Duke (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014), 241–63 [260].

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CONCLUSION: LIKE THE GUADALQUIVIR RIVER The main feature of Kierkegaard’s account of justification in the writings that we have examined is how he retains the centrality of the Gospel message of justification in defining the self extra se, outside oneself, in relation to Christ, while at the same time placing justification within the context of striving to follow Christ in discipleship. His concern above all is to rehabilitate a proper dialectic of justification by outlining carefully the two roles of Christ as prototype and as redeemer, never collapsing one into the other. Although his authorship stresses the role of Christ as prototype and the imitation of Christ, he never dilutes the centrality of Christ as redeemer and source of justification. This is perhaps especially surprising given that Kierkegaard seldom engages in extensive exegesis of Pauline texts on justification or critical doctrinal analysis of the issues concerning justification by grace through faith. Yet he shows a firm grasp of the biblical and doctrinal issues, and he accepts Lutheran teaching. His task is rather, I have suggested, that of creating a poetics of justification. Without reducing doctrines to affective states of the individual, he places the concepts of justification, faith and grace in human existence by tracing the passions, the movements of ‘inwardness’ that accompany understanding oneself as a ‘justified sinner’ in relation to God in Christ. Hence, he stresses the importance of the ‘anguished conscience’ that makes the context for justification by grace through faith good news indeed. He displays a firm grasp of the ‘grammar of Christian redemption’: the inbreaking of God’s revelation in Christ that creates a breach with immanent religion, disrupts human sinfulness and confronts one with the offensiveness of the theology of the cross. He adopts Luther’s central image of ‘restless faith’ to recapture how faith is active in love. His emphasis on James and the gospels does not subvert the Pauline message of faith but seeks to read Paul anew in relation to James and the gospels. In particular, central is his threefold hermeneutical strategies of inward deepening, the cross and discipleship in response to Christ as prototype, and grace and gratitude in response to Christ as redeemer, seen as a continuous movement in Christian existence. Furthermore, Kierkegaard is sensitive to the Lutheran tradition’s extensive reflection on how justification reflects on faith, works and law. He does significantly alter Lutheran doctrine when he speaks of Christ the prototype as law, but that only heightens the drama of his portrayal of Christ fulfilling and abolishing the law, grounding his account of the third use of the law within grace and gratitude. Hence, while Kierkegaard is strongly influenced by Pietism’s impulse to stress sanctification, he too, like Johann Arndt, never collapses justification into sanctification. In his explorations of Christ as atoner who as high priest takes our place, and in his portrayals of the humble receptivity of the tax collector and the woman who was a sinner, we have the very model of justification by grace through faith, the trust in God who not only forgives sin but also forgets sin. We see then too how Kierkegaard reflects on faith and love in speaking both of gratitude and of God’s forgiveness that ‘loves forth love’ in return. Repeatedly Kierkegaard addresses fears that works or striving or love itself in any way ‘merit’ one’s standing before God. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard does differ from the Lutheran tradition in one significant way: unlike Luther, Kierkegaard sees the Christian life in terms of the metaphor of the journey. As Lee C. Barrett argues, what Augustine and Kierkegaard have in common (and both in contrast to Luther) is the image of the Christian life as a journey of desire for God that is met by God’s kenotic self-emptying. One of Barrett’s theses is that when it comes to justification by grace through faith, both Augustine and Kierkegaard, even more than Luther, see justification as both an event of full acceptance by God here and now in the

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midst of that journey and as a process aimed at the final goal of mutual reciprocity with God.122 Luther, by contrast, provided an alternative to the image of the journey, ‘for he suggested that Christianity is not a matter of making spiritual progress but of trusting in God’s justification of the sinner. God and the believer meet in the present moment of faith, not at the end of a process of sanctification’.123 This suggests, furthermore, how Kierkegaard’s portrayal of justification might address recent ecumenical theology that goes beyond older binary oppositions between Roman Catholic and Protestant views, for Augustine’s stress on ‘faithful love’ and Kierkegaard’s stress on ‘loving faith’ are not that far apart. Certainly the intertwining of faith and love in the communion discourses may be an especially fruitful area for overcoming such oppositions.124 Yet central to Kierkegaard finally is something that Augustine did not stress but Luther knew well: that God’s full acceptance of sinners occurs now, in the present moment, and it is this full acceptance that gives the Christian the courage to continue to strive. Hence, in contrast to Augustine, Kierkegaard repeatedly insists that ‘not even the final attainment of saintliness is in any way meritorious’.125 Could Kierkegaard affirm that justification is the article by which the church stands or falls? Kierkegaard is too much a contextual theologian, and too much aware of the abuses of doctrine, to affirm this uncritically or undialectically. Yet when seen in its proper context, justification by grace through faith, as God’s ‘hiding’ but also God’s ‘uncreating’ and ‘forgetting’ of sin, emerges as central to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the ‘self before God’ (coram Deo). Simon D. Podmore sums up his first study of the coram Deo theme in Kierkegaard with these words: ‘I began thinking Kierkegaard’s “infinite, radical, qualitative difference” . . . between humanity and God was essentially sin. Mercifully, it concluded with the conviction that the true meaning of the infinite qualitative difference between God and humanity is expressed through forgiveness.’126 Thus, although Kierkegaard often does not discuss justification directly, the themes of justification pervade his thought. Even when they appear absent because of his disgust at the abuse of justification in ‘the present age’, these themes of justification emerge powerfully at the centre of his thinking. It reminds one of an image that Kierkegaard used to describe a peculiar formal feature of his authorship. Writing in his journal in 1849 he speaks of the Guadalquivir River that ‘at some place plunges underground and then comes out again’.127 Similarly, Kierkegaard said, he would ‘plunge into pseudonymity’ and then emerge again under his own name. It may be that justification by grace though faith is something like the Guadalquivir River in Kierkegaard’s authorship. In his passion to recover the importance of striving and following Christ in discipleship, it may appear that justification by grace through faith is

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Lee C. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2013), 324–51 [350]. Ibid., 114, 114n2; see also Hampson, Christian Contradictions, 9–55. On that intertwining, see, for example, Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 251–4. Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying, 350. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God, xi. See also Podmore’s reflections on ‘the impossible divine possibility of the forgiveness of sins’ (188) and how this sheds light on questions raised by Jacques Derrida and others on ‘the scandal of forgiveness’, the (im)possibility of forgiving the (un)forgivable (191). JP 6:6416, pp. 163–4 [163] / KJN 6, pp. 65–6 [65] / SKS 22, NB11:123, pp. 70–1 [70]; see also JP 6:6431, pp. 172–4 [173] / KJN 6, pp. 124–5 / SKS 22, NB11:204, pp. 127–8; and PC, 276, 279.

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absent. But perhaps it merely plunges underground, only to emerge at the end in a surging torrent, and so truly is the de profundis of Kierkegaardian faith.

FURTHER READING Hampson, Daphne. Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kierkegaard, Søren. Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, trans. Sylvia Walsh. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Perkins, Robert L., ed. International Kierkegaard Commentary: For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002. Perkins, Robert L., ed. International Kierkegaard Commentary: Without Authority. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007. Podmore, Simon D. Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

Sanctification: Kierkegaard and the Journey Towards Rest CHRISTOPHER B. BARNETT

INTRODUCTION That Kierkegaard’s theology betrays an interest in the concept of ‘sanctification’ would seem to be almost self-evident. After all, as is well known, Kierkegaard did not write about the Christian faith sub specie aeternitatis but, rather, paid particular attention to ‘the task of becoming a Christian’.1 Moreover, this approach entails an interest in what it means to live an actual Christian life, to participate as fully as possible in divine holiness – concerns typically associated with the subject of ‘sanctification’. Thus it is not surprising that one might view Kierkegaard as ‘restoring the theme of sanctification . . . to a position of prominence in the Christian life’.2 And yet it is not a topic that features prominently in the secondary literature. For example, Julia Watkin’s Historical Dictionary of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy lacks an entry on ‘sanctification’,3 and a pair of recent guidebooks to the Dane do not even list ‘sanctification’ in the index.4 It would seem, then, that one of the leading interests of Kierkegaard’s authorship – the task of growing in Christian holiness – lies outside the mainstream of scholarship on his work. Just why this is the case is an interesting question, albeit one that exceeds the scope of the present discussion. Suffice it to say that a number of factors are involved, ranging from linguistic peculiarities (the Latin-based term ‘sanctification’ is not found in Danish) to academic-cum-cultural fashion. Whatever the case, this chapter will endeavour to show that, while often appearing in subtle fashion, ‘sanctification’ is central to Kierkegaard’s theology. My argument will unfold in two ways. First, there will be an overview of the concept of ‘sanctification’, surveying not only its biblical foundations but also its doctrinal development from the patristic era to the early modern period. Here particular attention will

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PV, 55 / SKS 16, 37. Lee Barrett, Eros and Self-Emptying: The Intersections of Augustine and Kierkegaard (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 337. Julia Watkin, Historical Dictionary of Kierkegaard’s Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001). Though its title explicitly mentions ‘philosophy’, Watkin’s text nevertheless includes entries on ‘God’, ‘Grace’ and ‘Sin’, so it by no means ignores theology. Thus the omission of ‘sanctification’ cannot be attributed to its status as a theological topic. See The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

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be paid to the Pietist movement, which sought to reclaim ‘sanctification’ for Protestants – a reclamation that would come to have a key influence on Kierkegaard. Next, I will turn to the role that ‘sanctification’ plays in Kierkegaard’s own authorship. As mentioned, the word ‘sanctification’ does not appear in the Danish lexicon, but there is a basic equivalent: helliggørelse. This term is often translated as ‘sanctification’, but, since it is derived from the verb helliggøre (to make holy), it might be better rendered as ‘growth in holiness’. With this in mind, a fruitful way to explore Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘sanctification’ is to focus on his understanding of Christian holiness. This approach will entail certain formal concerns, clustering around Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Jesus Christ, not to mention existential categories such as ‘striving’ and ‘faith’. However, it will also allude to the social character of holiness in Kierkegaard’s thinking, noting that, in his view, Christian holiness will come into conflict with the world. But this encounter, while essential, is not the ultimate goal of the Christian life. That would be God himself, ‘the Alpha and the Omega’ (Rev. 1.8) of creation, in whom the sanctified person finds ‘rest’ after striving toward holiness.

I. THE CONCEPT OF SANCTIFICATION The term ‘sanctification’ is derived from the Latin word sanctus (holy), which is also the root of the English term ‘saint’. So, just as a ‘saint’ is one who is (or is deemed) holy, so does ‘sanctification’ refer to the process by which one is made holy. But what, then, is holiness? Sanctus is derived from the verb sacrare (to set apart), while ‘holy’ carries a somewhat different connotation, since it stems from the Germanic term heil (whole or unscathed). Thus ‘holiness’ might be defined as the attribute of a person who is set apart by virtue of her dedication to God and her attendant self-integration. In other words, the person who is holy is united with God and, in and through this union, brought to moral and spiritual perfection.5 While the term ‘sanctification’ itself does not figure heavily in the Bible, the themes of God’s holiness and the holiness of those who follow God are central. According to John Rogerson, the Old Testament ‘understands holiness as something ultimately grounded in the moral character of the God of Israel, whose chief attributes of unfailing love, mercy and forgiveness mark God as different from humankind, yet which are intended to transform humanity into what it is unable fully to achieve itself ’.6 This overarching theme is manifested in a variety of ways throughout the Hebrew Bible. For example, the priestly writings of the Old Testament – perhaps best exemplified by the book of Leviticus – focus less on the ethical side of holiness than on its cultic and ritual importance.7 At the same time, however, there are undertones in the priestly writings that gesture toward a ‘moral dimension’ of cultic practice, particularly in the so-called ‘Holiness Code’ (Lev. 17–26), which emphasizes that ‘the holy God will not tolerate sin and injustice among his holy people’.8 This is a theme that is expanded elsewhere in the Old Testament. 5

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Of course, terms such as ‘union’ and ‘perfection’ are complex on a historical as well as on a theological level, so much so that they cannot be treated in full here. However, they will be addressed below, inasmuch as they pertain to Kierkegaard’s approach to ‘sanctification’. John Rogerson, ‘What Is Holiness?’, in Holiness: Past & Present, ed. Stephen C. Barton (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 3–21 [21]. Philip Jenson, ‘Holiness in the Priestly Writings of the Old Testament’, in Holiness: Past & Present, ed. Stephen C. Barton (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 93–121 [110]. Ibid., 121.

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According to E. J. Tinsley, the notion of ‘the way’ (derek) is the fundamental theme of the Old Testament, inasmuch as it encompasses both Israel’s historical ‘way’ and the ‘way’ of Jewish law: ‘[K]eep the commandments of the Lord your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him’ (Deut. 8.6).9 In turn, it lies at the basis of New Testament conceptions of holiness. Jesus of Nazareth refers to himself as ‘the way [ὁδὸς], and the truth, and the life’ (Jn 14.6), and he repeatedly encourages his disciples to ‘deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me’ (Mt. 16.25).10 Moreover, the early Christians referred to their faith as ‘the Way’ (Acts 9.2),11 and, through the teaching of the Apostle Paul,12 the notion that the believer should live in the manner of Jesus became fundamental to Christian moral and spiritual reflection. Herein lies the terminus a quo of the Christian understanding of sanctification: ‘It was,’ as Harriet Luckman writes, ‘by living and acting as another Christ that one obtained salvation.’13 Indeed, there was ‘little concerning the actual doctrine of sanctification’14 in early Christian literature, and the New Testament itself prefers to intimate, rather than to explicate, the issue. For example, Paul declares that Christ is the source of ‘sanctification’ (ἁγιασμὸς) (1 Cor. 1.30), and the author of the First Epistle of Peter speaks of the ‘sanctification’ (ἁγιασμῷ) of the Holy Spirit (1 Pet. 1.2). All told, this term ἁγιασμὸς appears but ten times in the entire New Testament. Nevertheless, such scarce and concise references already sketch the contours of later teaching on the subject. Attributing the source of sanctification to both Christ and the Holy Spirit grounds the sanctifying process in the life of the triune God, inasmuch as the Spirit’s activity consists in moulding the disciple into the ‘image of the Son’.15 In other words, one will come to exemplify the holiness of Christ to the extent that one is open to the activity of the Spirit. And yet, this holiness is not reducible to ascetic practices or to mystical experiences. Rather, it involves becoming like Christ in thought as well as in deed, for it is in Christlikeness that one learns what it means ‘to be truly human’.16 These were themes that Christian theologians would continue to wrestle with in the ensuing centuries. After all, it is one thing to insist that holiness consists in being like Christ but something else to explain how that is possible, given the reality of human sin. This was a problem that Augustine of Hippo, ‘the first Christian writer to develop doctrinal ideas and language for sanctification’,17 famously confronted. In trying to determine the nature of Christian holiness and the process by which it is attained, Augustine positioned himself between Manichaeism on the one hand and Pelagianism on the other.

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All biblical quotes are taken from the NRSV, unless otherwise noted. Also see E. J. Tinsley, The Imitation of God in Christ: An Essay on the Biblical Basis of Christian Spirituality (London: Westminster, 1960), 34–49. Also see, e.g., Mt. 8.19, 21; 11.9; 19.28; Mk 1.17; 2.14; 8.34; 10.21; Lk. 9.23, 57, 61; Jn 1.43; 10.4, 10.27, 12.26; 13.36; 21.19; 21.22. Also see, e.g., Acts 16.17; 18.25; 19.9, 23; 22.4; 24.14, 22. See, e.g., Rom. 6.4; 1 Cor. 7.17; 2 Cor 5.7; Phil. 2.5-8; 1 Thess. 2.12. Harriet A. Luckman, ‘Sanctification’, in The New Westminster Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. Philip Sheldrake (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 561–2 [561]. Ibid. Ibid. Derek Tidball, ‘Holiness: Restoring God’s Image’, in Sanctification: Explorations in Theology and Practice, ed. Kelly M. Kapic (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2014), 25–33 [31]. It is worth adding that, for Tidball, Col. 3.5-17 is the biblical text par excellence for understanding sanctification. Yet, here again, the overarching motif is that of the ‘renewal’ (Col. 3.11) of the disciple, so that the ‘peace of Christ’ (Col. 3.15) and the ‘word of Christ’ (Col. 3.16) come to distinguish his or her life. Luckman, ‘Sanctification’, 561.

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The former posited a cosmological dualism, which divided the world into opposing realms of spiritual light and material darkness, whereas the latter insisted that, despite the fallenness of creation, human beings could achieve holiness without extraordinary divine assistance. Contra the Manichees, Augustine emphasized ‘the goodness of creation which is the work of the divine Creator’.18 Thus he maintains that sanctification should not be pitted against institutions such as marriage, in which the union of man and woman, ‘with one heart and one mind towards God, signifies the unity of the heavenly city’.19 And yet, contra the Pelagian bishop, Julian of Eclanum (ca. 386–454), Augustine sought to delimit the possibility of achieving holiness in this life, since, as he saw it, all persons ‘were subject to original sin, and life inside the cloister was . . . just as subject to temptation and sin, as life outside and beyond it’.20 Hence, for Augustine, sanctification is an intrinsically delicate pursuit, which is only ever ‘partially attained’21 by virtue of God’s grace, especially as mediated through the sacraments of the church. The two sides of Augustine’s treatment of sanctification – that, on the one hand, it does not contradict earthly life, even as, on the other, it is only possible through the grace of God – became central to later theological debates. Though affirming both aspects of the Augustinian position, Thomas Aquinas was associated with an emphasis on the elevation of the disciple ‘to a higher level of being’, whereby he or she received ‘the knowledge, possession and enjoyment of God’.22 For Aquinas, this elevation is always, in a certain sense, sola gratia. That is to say, in his view, holiness is only possible through the infusion of sanctifying grace, ‘which comes from the inexhaustible merits of Christ and is imparted to believers through the sacraments’.23 And yet, despite such qualifications, holiness is the goal of all Christians,24 since ‘the perfection of God is the goal that all things are called to attain insofar as is possible’.25 Thus Aquinas articulates the basic rationale for what has become a key aspect of Catholic piety – namely, the veneration of ‘saints’ or those who have been sanctified. Saints stand as reminders of what every human being can be and of what every Catholic is called to be. And yet, despite (or even because of) such winsome sentiments, this emphasis on sainthood has not been retained in the Protestant tradition. Many of the leading figures

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Carol Harrison, ‘Finding a via media: The Moderation of Holiness in Fourth-century Western Asceticism’, in Holiness: Past & Present, ed. Stephen C. Barton (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 239–59 [256]. Ibid., 257. Ibid., 259. Ibid. Luckman, ‘Sanctification’, 561. Ibid. It should be added that, for Aquinas, holiness is tantamount to perfect charity. In an absolute sense, such charity is not possible for a human being, since only God is ‘good . . . wholly and essentially’ and therefore capable of a love commensurate with unconditional good. However, it is possible for a human being to love God in such a way that his or her ‘affective faculty always actually tends to God as much as it possibly can’. Perfection in this sense is part of the blessedness of heaven, though one prepares for it ‘on the way’. This praeparatio constitutes the third sense of perfect charity, which consists of the ‘removal of obstacles to the movement of love towards God’ and towards neighbour. It is in this latter sense that the human being, through grace, may be said to attain holiness in this life. See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae, Q. 184, Art. 2. As will be seen, Kierkegaard’s understanding of sanctification is quite similar to that of Aquinas, though the Dane would surely question Aquinas’s subsequent claim (based on Pseudo-Dionysius’s The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy) that certain clerical offices provide a ‘perpetual obligation to things pertaining to perfection’ and so ‘more freely . . . give [one] to God, wherein consists the perfection of the present life’. See Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae, Q. 184, Art. 5. Edgardo Colón-Emeric, Wesley, Aquinas, and Christian Perfection: An Ecumenical Dialogue (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 79.

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of the Protestant Reformation ‘preferred to speak of sanctification by emphasizing the incompatibility of sin and redemption’.26 Martin Luther, for example, worried that a priori conceptualizations of holiness – or, to put it in more colloquial terms, preconceived notions about what an ideal Christian looks or acts like – are not signposts toward sanctification but, rather, human attempts ‘to retain control over the flow of grace’.27 Thus the Catholic stress on holiness tempts one to usurp the role of God, and the ‘desire to be as God (homo deificatus) is the root of all sin’.28 Hence, for Luther, sin has so insinuated itself into human life that sanctification only ‘occurs beyond reason, perception or conscious awareness’.29 One cannot identify a saint by ascetic prowess, ecclesial recognition or even charitable work; to be holy is the fruit of a simple faith in God and his mercy. Implicit in this statement is Luther’s famous doctrine of sola fide: the Christian is made righteous before God, not through the works of the law (Rom. 3.28; Gal. 2.16), but through faith in Jesus Christ (Rom. 1.17; 9.30-1). And while Luther did not intend this understanding of justification to eradicate an emphasis on sanctification, it has been accused of facilitating such an outcome. As Bradley Hanson notes, ‘I find my own Lutheran tradition rather weak on the matter of sanctification . . . Lutherans have been so concerned to stress the forgiveness of sins, that sanctification has often been regarded as a dangerous topic and given minor treatment.’30 This tension harks back to the first few decades of the Lutheran tradition, not to mention Protestantism writ large. Indeed, in the wake of Luther’s death in 1546, the dialectic between justification and sanctification occasioned a doctrinal fault line. According to the GnesioLutherans – so called because they claimed to be ‘genuine’ (γνήσιος) Lutherans – human beings are totally incapable of cooperating in the process of salvation. Their leader, Matija Vlačić Ilirik (better known as Matthias Flacius Illyricus), a Wittenberg theologian of Croatian upbringing, even went so far as to claim that human beings are formally in the image of Satan, inasmuch as their ‘formal essence or substance is original sin’.31 In contrast, Philipp Melanchthon and his Philippist party promoted a more moderate perspective, insisting that, while justification is sola fide, the believer still must acquiesce to the grace tendered by God. As Melanchthon notes, ‘The mercy of God is the true cause of election, but nevertheless to some degree there is some cause in the one accepting, insofar as one does not refuse the offer of the promise due to the evil that is within us.’32 Thus Melanchthon left room for human participation in the process of justification33 and thereby preserved, albeit in attenuated form, the older, Catholic emphasis on one’s need to desire the personal renewal associated with the Christian life. In subsequent years, prominent Lutheran theologians such as Martin Chemnitz developed a so-called ‘Protestant Scholasticism’, whose ‘closely worded doctrinal

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Luckman, ‘Sanctification’, 561. Dietmar Lage, Martin Luther’s Christology and Ethics (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1990), 83. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 86. Bradley C. Hanson, Introduction to Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 249. Robert Kolb, ‘Human Nature, the Fall, and the Will’, in T&T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology, ed. David M. Whitford (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 14–31 [22]. Also see Oliver K. Olson, ‘Matthias Flacius (1520–1575)’, in The Reformation Theologians, ed. Carter Lindberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 83–93 [88ff.]. Quoted in Gregory Graybill, Evangelical Free Will: Phillipp Melanchthon’s Doctrinal Journey on the Origins of Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xvi. Ibid.

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statements of faith’34 intended to mend the rift between Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists. Others, however, sought to move away from creedal disputes and to recover an emphasis on the process of sanctification. The latter approach appealed to Johann Arndt – a Lutheran cleric, who himself was concerned with the ‘disintegration of true Christianity’.35 Arndt would eventually promote the theme of holiness in True Christianity (1606–10), his own four-volume treatise on the spiritual life. It was this book that would ignite the Pietist movement and become so significant that Arndt’s influence among Protestants may even exceed that of Luther.36 Of course, there is not scope to explore the history of Pietism in this context,37 but three major points are worth highlighting. First, according to Martin Brecht, Pietism is a ‘transnational and transconfessional phenomenon’38 within Protestantism, whose impact is still felt today in and through ecclesial denominations such as the United Methodist Church and the Moravian Church. Second, though it was and is a Protestant movement, a key aspect of the Pietist legacy lies in its reclamation of Catholic spirituality and, with it, an emphasis on sanctification.39 Of particular importance here are the writings associated with die Deutsche Mystik – the so-called ‘German mysticism’ of the medieval Dominican thinker, Meister Eckhart, and his later disciples, Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Seuse. Martin Luther was an early devotee of die Deutsche Mystik, and, though he later distanced himself from the movement, Pietists such as Arndt and Philipp Jakob Spener believed that its emphasis on an attitude of spiritual humility and openness not only could be squared with Protestant teaching but should be for the sake of Christian holiness. Third, it was precisely this sort of spirituality that made its way to Kierkegaard, who was raised in a household of Moravian Pietists and who read Pietist literature throughout his life ‘for upbuilding’ (til Opbyggelse).40 This survey has established the basis for Kierkegaard’s own interest in sanctification. From the biblical and early Patristic background he grasps the importance of holiness and ‘the way’ as grounded in the relationship with God, in imitation of Christ, and as enabled by the Spirit. With Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he wrestles with the relation of sin and grace and holiness as charity. From the Protestant and especially Lutheran tradition he is sensitive to the relation of justification by faith to sanctification and the question of the human being’s role in that process. Most importantly, it is from his engagement with Pietism that Kierkegaard attempts to reclaim an emphasis on sanctification and holiness. It follows, then, that emphases on sanctification and on holiness would turn up throughout Kierkegaard’s oeuvre. But how, exactly, does he develop them? And what is their significance for his authorship? It is to these questions that this chapter now turns.

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Peter C. Erb, ‘Introduction’, in Johann Arndt: True Christianity (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 3. Quoted in ibid., 204. Johannes Wallmann, ‘Johann Arndt und die Protestantische Frömmigkeit: Zur Rezeption der mittelalterlichen Mystik im Luthertum’, in Frömmigkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit: Studien zur religiösen Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, ed. Dieter Breuer (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), 50–74 [52]. I have, however, treated this subject in detail elsewhere: see Christopher B. Barnett, Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). Quoted in Carter Lindberg, ‘Introduction’, in The Pietist Theologians, ed. Carter Lindberg (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2005), 3. Here, again, see my Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness, especially chapter 3, ‘Kierkegaard’s Reading of Pietist Literature: An Investigation of Themes Christian and Socratic’. JP 2, 1844, p. 318 / SKS 20, NB4:102, p. 335.

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II. SANCTIFICATION IN KIERKEGAARD’S AUTHORSHIP As noted earlier, the Danish word for ‘sanctification’ is helliggørelse,41 and it has a host of related terms – hellig (holy), hellige (to devote to), helliggøre (to make holy or to sanctify), helligholde (to keep holy or to hallow) and helligt (sacredly). Taken as a group, Kierkegaard employs these terms frequently, with hellig, helligt, and especially hellige (whether as an adjective, as a verb or, when paired with the definite article, as a noun) turning up nearly seven hundred times in his published and unpublished writings. At the very least, such a large number suggests Kierkegaard’s interest in the theme of holiness or ‘the holy’. And yet, by the same token, it is intriguing that Helliggjørelse and its variants are used much more sparingly. Helliggjørelse itself turns up only three times, all in Kierkegaard’s unpublished writings. Two of these references stem from his student days and are in the form of notes.42 The third dates from 1847 and belongs to the composition of the third section of Practice in Christianity, ‘From on High He Will Draw All to Himself ’. Made up of seven ‘Christian Expositions’, which Kierkegaard ascribes to Anti-Climacus, ‘From on High’ was conceived as a series of writings on ‘the relation between [Christ’s] lowliness and his loftiness’.43 With this in mind, Anti-Climacus actually opens ‘From on High’ with a ‘discourse delivered by Magister Kierkegaard in Frue Church on Friday, September 1, 1848’, which, he notes, has a ‘more lenient tone’ than his own writings.44 By this, it seems, Anti-Climacus is referring to the fact that Kierkegaard does not place excessive stress on the disciple’s need to suffer in imitation of Christ, since, as he explains, ‘Jesus Christ is the same in his abasement as in his loftiness’.45 Thus the discourse emphasizes the sinner’s humility before God and how the sinner does not move toward Christ without ‘already feel[ing] himself drawn’46 to him – a theme adumbrated in the opening prayer, which asks that Christ, ‘our Savior and Redeemer’, overcome the sinner’s ‘angst . . . that flees the purity of holiness [Helliges] as illness flees the medicine’.47 If sin humbles the human being, Christ is stronger than sin, and if Christ is stronger than sin, then holiness remains possible in and through Christ. Kierkegaard puts the matter even more strongly in another version of this prayer, which, intriguingly, he elected to omit from the final edition. In this rendering, which dates from 1847, he notes that Christ is ‘the eternally strongest one’, who releases persons from ‘the fetters of unworthy concerns’ and ‘the heavy chains of sin’.48 But this salvation

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It should be noted that, strictly speaking, the word Kierkegaard uses is Helliggjørelse, whose capitalization and spelling accords with the conventions of nineteenth-century Danish. But otherwise the two terms are identical. Nevertheless, in keeping with Kierkegaard’s usage, Helliggjørelse will be employed for the rest of this chapter. SKS 19, Notebook 1:8, p. 62, and SKS 19, Notebook 10:9, p. 300. For more on Kierkegaard’s theological training, see George Pattison, Kierkegaard and the Theology of the Nineteenth Century: The Paradox and the ‘Point of Contact’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). SKS 21, NB7:4, p. 77. PC, 151 / SKS 12, 155. A number of journal entries suggest that Kierkegaard himself agonized over whether or not to include this discourse. For example, an 1849 entry notes, ‘If “From on High He Will Draw All to Himself ” is to be pseudonymous, then the first discourse will have to be omitted, since it actually was preached by me in Frue Church.’ PC, 338 / SKS 22, NB11:124, p. 74. Later, however, he changed his mind, explaining, ‘If it is to be made . . . pseudonymous, it has to be . . . changed as follows: a note added to the first discourse: (1) This discourse was delivered by Magister K.; but since it has given me the idea for the title to the whole book, I have with his permission let it be printed.’ PC, 339. PC, 154 / SKS 12, 157–8. PC, 156 / SKS 12, 159. PC, 151 / SKS 12, 155, my translation. PC, 270 / SKS 20, NB2:247, p. 233.

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is not merely imputed to the sinner. On the contrary, it is ‘God’s will’ that people be saved in order to make ‘possible, our sanctification [Helliggjørelse]’.49 Indeed, this ‘is why you descended into the low regions of the earth, and this is why you ascended again on high in order to draw us to yourself from there’.50 This statement ends the prayer, but it is pregnant with theological significance, recalling the famous maxim of Athanasius of Alexandria: ‘[Christ] . . . assumed humanity that we might become God.’51 Here the dual paradox of the Christian faith becomes evident, since, for Athanasius and for Kierkegaard, it is not just that Christ is fully divine and fully human but also that he would beatify and even apotheosize fallen human beings as well.52 To be sure, the notion that the Christian life is ultimately a sharing in the holiness of God is fundamental to Kierkegaard’s thought. This is why, as cited above, some commentators have argued that Kierkegaard was seeking to restore sanctification to a place of prominence in Christian theology. And yet, to state this point hardly accounts for how Kierkegaard develops his understanding of sanctification, which, as will be argued, can be summarized in four distinct yet interrelated steps. Of course, one might construct a different typology – and all typologies have drawbacks – but the following itinerary should make clear that Kierkegaard understands sanctification as a dynamic, teleological process, culminating in union with God.

Striving1 One of the more curious categories in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre is that of ‘religiousness A’. Developed chiefly by Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments (1846), religiousness A refers to a ‘universal religiosity’, which assumes that ‘the individual can reach God within temporality and . . . through personal striving’.53 This striving primarily takes places through what Climacus terms ‘inward deepening’,54 a process that is ‘pathos-filled’ (pathetisk), inasmuch as it confronts the individual’s relation to the possibility of eternity rather than to a given temporal end. Since the horizon of the eternal is not unique to Christianity – indeed, Climacus sees it as intrinsic to the consciousness of all human beings – this pathetic religiousness is termed ‘religiousness A’. In this way, it is distinguished from ‘religiousness B’, which Climacus equates with the ‘paradoxically dialectical’55 teachings of Christianity. In other words,

49 50 51 52

53 54 55

PC, 270 / SKS 20, NB2:247, p. 233. PC, 270 / SKS 20, NB2:247, p. 233. St Athanasius, On the Incarnation (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 93. It is worth noting that Kierkegaard was familiar with Athanasius, chiefly through the works of the German Catholic authors Joseph von Görres and Johann Adam Möhler. In fact, Kierkegaard seems to have been particularly enamoured with Görres’s Athanasius (1838): ‘I have been reading Görres’ Athanasius these days, not only with my eyes but with my whole body – from the bottom of my heart [Hjertekulen].’ JP 5:5321, p. 119 / SKS 18, FF:142, p. 102, my translation. As Robert Puchniak notes, ‘Beyond Athanasius’ interest in the Incarnation as paradox, it can be suggested that there were other good reasons why Kierkegaard might have been enraptured by this church father. What might have appealed to Kierkegaard was Athanasius’ ability to draw connections between theology . . . and human existence (e.g., anthropology and Christian practice): in the well-known formula, God became human that human beings might become like God. The Incarnation makes all human possibilities possible’. Robert Puchniak, ‘Athanasius: Kierkegaard’s Curious Comment’, in Kierkegaard and the Patristic and Medieval Traditions, ed. Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 4 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 3–9 [5]. Watkin, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy, 212. CUP, 556 / SKS 7, 506. CUP, 556 / SKS 7, 506.

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whereas religiousness B posits the dialectical contradiction that ‘the god, the eternal, has come into existence at a specific moment in time as an individual’56 and that this historical event is constitutive of the individual’s eternal happiness, religiousness A is grounded, not in a paradoxical divine revelation, but in the very structure of the self. It might appear, then, that Climacus is postulating a clean break between immanence and transcendence, but such a conclusion would put the matter too simply. On the contrary, since religiousness A inheres in human nature, it is as much a part of the Christian’s consciousness as, say, that of the pagan or the Buddhist. Thus Climacus insists that true Christianity consists in the combination of both religiousness A and religiousness B: ‘Religiousness A must first be present in the individual before there can be any consideration of becoming aware of the dialectical B.’57 Ultimately, this point discloses Christianity as a religion of striving, both in an immanent and in a transcendent-paradoxical sense. The former aspect, of course, belongs to religiousness A, which, according to Climacus, ‘is so strenuous for a human being that there is always a sufficient task in it’.58 Consequently, the challenges of religiousness A perdure for the Christian, and, as noted, the very possibility of becoming a Christian hinges on the realization of religiousness A. Hence, while it is true that religiousness A lacks the soteriological significance of religiousness B – precisely insofar as it lacks the intermediary figure of Jesus Christ and therefore (mistakenly, in Climacus’s estimation) presumes a direct relationship with God59 – it is also true that religiousness A is crucial to the development of Christian faith. But how, exactly, does the striving of religiousness A – which I will henceforth designate as striving1, since it constitutes a distinct and primal form of striving within Kierkegaard’s overall conception of holiness – manifest itself? According to Climacus, striving1 can be divided in a trio of escalating expressions. The first expression involves the individual’s attempt to live in accordance with an absolute end (τέλος), which Climacus tends to equate with eternal happiness.60 In other words, the person engaged in striving1 is conscious that her life has an ultimate purpose and, in turn, works to comport herself in such a way that this ultimate purpose is the raison d’être in everything she does. At the same time, however, mundane existence is permeated by relative ends, from daily requirements of food and drink to more abstract concerns about social status. Thus striving1 necessitates a progressive paring away of relative ends for the sake of the absolute τέλος. This is a difficult task, and so it is indeed a ‘striving’ – a word that is etymologically related to the terms ‘strife’ (to fight) and ‘stride’ (to move with long steps). The one who strives moves forward, albeit by degrees and with struggle. To be sure, Climacus argues that the next expression of striving1 lies in the awareness of just this fact – namely, that no matter how hard one tries to attain an absolute relation to the absolute τέλος, relative ends will always interfere. This realization may seem to be a step back, but it is a key moment on the path of striving1. First, it discloses that, at its most basic level, the religious life is constituted by limitation: one is called by an ultimate purpose and yet that purpose is unattainable. Relative ends, which are always already finite and ephemeral, are ipso facto different than the absolute τέλος, and, for that reason,

56 57 58 59

60

CUP, 578 / SKS 7, 526. CUP, 556 / SKS 7, 506. CUP, 557 / SKS 7, 506. On this topic, see, e.g., Jamie Turnbull, ‘Kierkegaard and the Limits of Philosophical Anthropology ’, in A Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Jon Stewart (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 468–79, esp. 476–7. CUP, 452–6 / SKS 7, 411–15.

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they cannot offer an eternal happiness. And yet, relative ends are inescapable in temporal life, thereby obstructing one’s quest for the highest good. Hence, at this stage, one comes to perceive that earthly life is alienated from any transcendent purpose. In other words, to draw on Climacus’s language, ‘essential existential pathos’ is ‘suffering, because the individual is unable to transform himself ’.61 How should one respond to such a devastating insight? According to Climacus, it is here that the person engaged in striving1 must take a third and final step: she must come to accept that she is responsible for her separation from the absolute τέλος. Where a total commitment was required, only a partial response was given, and thus ‘guilt [Skyld] is made the decisive expression’.62 The use of the word ‘guilt’ should not be confused with an external imputation of judgement, nor should it be conflated with a downcast feeling. Rather, for Climacus, ‘guilt is the expression for the strongest self-assertion of existence’,63 and so guilt is the appropriate existential correlate to the individual’s failure to attain eternal happiness – a failure that, to reiterate, emerges when an absolute relation to an absolute τέλος is rendered impossible. Thus guilt is ‘no empirical qualification, is no summa summarum’64 but is, rather, an ‘eternal recollecting of guilt-consciousness’ in such a way that one ‘is now distanced from [the absolute τέλος] as much as possible, but . . . still relates [oneself] to it’.65 Climacus likens this state to being ‘forever imprisoned, buckled in the harness of guilt’, from which, in purely immanent terms, a human being ‘never gets out’.66 In the end, then, striving1 stands as a paradoxical first step toward sanctification: one moves in the direction of holiness by coming to recognize one’s utter separation from it. And yet, this paradox is hardly foreign to the spiritual literature favoured by Kierkegaard. For example, Tauler’s writings put forward what Alois Haas terms a ‘mysticism of ascent to the same degree as it is mysticism of descent’,67 and a similar approach can be found in Pietist authors such as Johann Arndt, Gerhard Tersteegen and Hans Adolph Brorson.68 Climacus, then, belongs to a long line of thinkers who understand the religious life as beginning with a fundamental spiritual poverty – a poverty that, for him, is necessary for the eventual flowering of Christian faith and holiness.

Faith In his recent book, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith (2014), Merold Westphal identifies no fewer than twelve ways that Kierkegaard treats the notion of ‘faith’, from ‘Faith as the Task of a Lifetime’ to ‘Faith as Contemporaneity with Christ – Without Offense’.69 To be sure,

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69

CUP, 433 / SKS 7, 478. CUP, 526 / SKS 7, 478. CUP, 528 / SKS 7, 479. CUP, 529 / SKS 7, 481. CUP, 535 / SKS 7, 486. CUP, 533 / SKS 7, 485. Alois Haas, ‘Preface’, in Johannes Tauler: Sermons, trans. Maria Shrady (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), x. See, again, my Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness. Also see Christopher B. Barnett, ‘Hans Adolph Brorson: Danish Pietism’s Greatest Hymn Writer and His Relation to Kierkegaard’, in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Early Modern Traditions: Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 5: tome II (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 63–80, and Christopher B. Barnett, ‘Gerhard Tersteegen: Kierkegaard’s Reception of a Man of “Noble Piety and Simple Wisdom”’, in Kierkegaard and the Renaissance and Early Modern Traditions: Tome II: Theology, ed. Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 5: tome II (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 245–58. Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014).

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faith is a complex theme that turns up throughout the Dane’s authorship, and it cannot be dealt with comprehensively in this setting. Still, with regard to sanctification, a few points rise to the fore. First, whereas striving1 involves the individual’s own inward deepening, faith is orientated away from the individual to a ‘definite something that qualifies the eternal happiness more specifically’, albeit ‘not as a task for thinking but as paradoxically repelling and giving rise to new pathos’.70 In other words, faith involves a relationship with the person of Jesus Christ, though this relationship is rooted above all in the way a person lives her life: ‘[O]ne does not prepare oneself to become aware of Christianity by reading books or by world-historical surveys, but by immersing oneself in existing.’71 But what, exactly, does it mean to have a relationship with Jesus Christ in this sense of existential immersion? It is clear that, for Climacus, such a relationship can never be a matter of mere doctrinal assent or philosophical comprehension, for ‘the passion of faith’72 is not about understanding the paradox. On the contrary, it is about using ‘the understanding so much that through it [one] becomes aware of the incomprehensible’73 and so ‘in time comes to relate himself to the eternal in time’.74 Kierkegaard fleshes out this point in a number of his post-1846 writings, especially those ascribed to ‘Anti-Climacus’.75 In The Sickness unto Death, for example, AntiClimacus treats faith as a means of rooting out despair and sin.76 It is thus essential to psychospiritual wholeness – a point that will be revisited below – but it also involves concrete activity in the world. Anti-Climacus underlines this latter issue in his second treatise, Practice in Christianity, which, according to Kierkegaard, treats ‘the requirement for being a Christian’ in terms of its ‘supreme ideality’.77 As it turns out, this ideality is tantamount to faith, albeit in a particular sense: Anti-Climacus insists that faith beholds Christ in his ‘form of abasement’ rather than in a ‘thoughtless-romantic or a historical-talkative remembrance’.78 To see Christ as he walked on earth is to be ‘contemporary with Christ’s presence as his contemporaries were’.79 Moreover, ‘contemporaneity is the condition of faith, and, more sharply defined, it is faith’.80 This approach may seem fanciful, as if one’s faith in Christ were reducible to a quasimystical or fantastical vision. But Anti-Climacus explicitly denies such an interpretation, arguing that the one who merely ponders or admires Christ exhibits ‘a cunning that seeks evasion and excuse’.81 Indeed, since the virtues exemplified by Christ – humility, patience and love of neighbor, among others – are ‘not linked to any condition save that which is

70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81

CUP, 556 / SKS 7, 506. CUP, 560 / SKS 7, 509. CUP, 565 / SKS 7, 514. CUP, 568 / SKS 7, 516. CUP, 570 / SKS 7, 518. Kierkegaard attributed two works to Anti-Climacus – namely, The Sickness unto Death (1849) and Practice in Christianity (1850). The pseudonym itself is meant to echo that of ‘Johannes Climacus’, albeit with a twist. The prefix ‘Anti-’ does not indicate opposition but, rather, superiority. Indeed, as Kierkegaard explains it, AntiClimacus offers a more authoritative interpretation of Christianity. JP 6, 6433, p. 174 / SKS 22, NB11:209, p. 130. It makes sense, then, to approach Anti-Climacus’s conception of faith as a deepening of Climacus’s reading. See, e.g., SUD, 131 / SKS 11, 130. PC, 7 / SKS 12, 15. Kierkegaard makes this comment in the ‘Editor’s Preface’ to Practice in Christianity. PC, 9 / SKS 12, 17. PC, 9 / SKS 12, 17. PC, 9 / SKS 12, 17. PC, 242 / SKS 12, 235.

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in everyone’s power’,82 then ‘it is a lie, deceit, is sin to want to admire in relation to Christ . . . instead of imitating him’.83 Hence, if it is true that faith succeeds striving1 on the path to sanctification, it is also true that faith in Christ inaugurates another form of striving – a striving to resemble Christ and to put forth ‘effort [Stræben] to resemble him’.84 This struggle, which does not precede but succeeds Christian faith, I shall refer to as striving2.

Striving2 As has been noted, Kierkegaard was rooted in Pietism, both on a personal and on an intellectual level. One of the main features of the Pietist tradition was an emphasis on imitatio Christi – an emphasis that extends from precursors such as Tauler and Thomas à Kempis to later pillars such Arndt, Spener, Brorson and the Moravian bishop, Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf. With each of these figures, not to mention several others, concerted attention was paid to the form of Christian faith, that is, to the fact that faith is not just a cognitive assent to ecclesial dogma but, rather, a particular way of life. For example, Arndt maintains that Jesus Christ is the ‘example, mirror, and rule for [one’s] life’,85 and Brorson proclaims that the ‘footprints of Jesus are the only way to the glory of heaven’.86 Kierkegaard takes up just these themes, insisting, like his predecessors, that Christian faith demands that one imitate Christ. Again, it is this task of imitation that constitutes striving2. But herein a problem immediately manifests itself: What, exactly, does it mean to imitate Christ? The basic answer to this question is, as noted above, delineated by Anti-Climacus: Christ came to the world with the purpose of saving the world, also with the purpose – this in turn is implicit in his first purpose – of being the prototype [Forbilledet], of leaving footprints for the person who wanted to join him, who then might become an imitator [Efterfølger], this indeed corresponds to ‘footprints’ [Fodspor]. That is why he let himself be born in lowliness and thereupon lived poor, abandoned, despised, abased . . . Why, then, this lowliness and abasement? Because he who is truly to be the prototype and be related only to imitators must in one sense be behind people, propelling forward, while in another sense he stands ahead, beckoning. This is the relation of loftiness and lowliness in the prototype. The loftiness must not be the direct kind, which is worldly, the earthly, but the spiritual, and thus the very negation of worldly and earthly loftiness. The lowliness must be the direct kind, because direct lowliness . . . makes sure that loftiness is not taken in vain.87 Thus Christ is ‘the image’ (-billedet) that stands ‘before’ (For-) the believer, and his image is that of total humility and self-dispossessive love. The believer, then, is to conform his life to this image, and yet precisely therein lies the difficulty, since living as one ‘poor, abandoned, despised, abased’ necessitates both physical and spiritual suffering.

82 83 84 85 86

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PC, 242 / SKS 12, 235. PC, 243 / SKS 12, 236. PC, 242 / SKS 12, 235. Johann Arndt, True Christianity, trans. Peter C. Erb (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 39. Hans Adolph Brorson, Troens rare Klenodie med Svane-Sang: Psalmer og aandelige Sange (Copenhagen: H. H. J. Lynges Forlag, 1879), 216. PC, 238 / SKS 12, 231–2.

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Consequently, conformity to the image of Christ will not happen immediately but, rather, must take place over time. It is a process, a striving. Still, to think of imitatio Christi in this way seems to lead to another problem: Is not Anti-Climacus – and, by extension, Kierkegaard – promoting a kind of ‘worksrighteousness’? In other words, does not the call to imitate Christ is his self-dispossessive love equate Christian holiness with external activity and, in turn, nullify the notion (particularly strong in the Protestant tradition) that one is made righteous through faith rather than through works? It must be said that Kierkegaard struggled with this problem. On the one hand, he was deeply sceptical of the notion that faith is a mere internal state, which lacks any corresponding external expression. ‘In a certain sense,’ Climacus notes, ‘it is somewhat appalling to speak this way about a person’s interiority, that it can be there and not be there without being directly discernible outwardly.’88 In an 1854 journal entry, Kierkegaard strengthens this point, arguing that the greatest fault of Christendom is that it fosters a pretend Christianity, in which one adopts Christian teaching and mannerisms but otherwise ‘lets life go the way it is going’.89 As he explains, ‘Everyone who is a Christian in such a way that he says: In hidden inwardness or on Sunday in church I evoke these exalted thoughts, but in practical life, I know very well things don’t go that way, and so in practical life I do just as the practical world does.’90 Indeed, this is a mockery of Christianity, which is not so much about private belief as about real social change: ‘What the God of Christianity wanted was a transformation of the world, though surely the transformation of the actual, the practical world.’91 It is with this in mind that Kierkegaard penned Works of Love (1847) – a series of ‘deliberations’ (Overveielser) that are ‘not about love but about works of love’,92 since the ‘hidden life of love is recognizable by its fruits’.93 And yet, while Kierkegaard is critical of hidden inwardness, he is also careful to insist that an appropriate external orientation should not be taken as a guarantor of faith and its holiness. This concern animates much of Climacus’s criticism of monastic movements in the Postscript. As he sees it, the great error of monasticism is that it seeks to express faith by way of a ‘distinctive separate outwardness’94 – for example, the connection to a certain religious group or the adoption of a particular manner of dress. Climacus concedes that such lifestyle changes are laudable, inasmuch as they imply that faith should involve personal transformation.95 However, they confuse this transformation with the sorts of habits and practices that, in truth, temper the demands of Christianity. Indeed, for Climacus, the monastic is willing to deny herself but only in such a way that it is celebrated as self-denial; consequently, she earns respect from others and, in turn, sidesteps the suffering that is essential to authentic religious striving.96 Even worse, to whatever extent the monastic actually does attempt to foster an absolute relation to the absolute τέλος, he does so by eschewing the relative ends of common life and by fashioning ‘a little cubbyhole [Aflukke] in order to be able to occupy [himself] properly with the absolute’.97 But

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

CUP, 407 / SKS 7, 370. JP 1, 561 / SKS 26, NB33:28, p. 269. JP 1, 561 / SKS 26, NB33:28, p. 269. JP 1, 561 / SKS 26, NB33:28, p. 269, my translation. WL, 3 / SKS 9, 11. WL, 10 / SKS 9, 18. CUP, 405 / SKS 7, 368. CUP, 401–4 / SKS 7, 365–8. CUP, 409 / SKS 7, 372. CUP, 407–8 / SKS 7, 370–1.

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this need to carve out a ‘safe space’ for the sake of piety is deceptive, since, on Climacus’s logic, no expression of human religiousness is capable of transcending the finitude and relativity of earthly life.98 The monastic’s confidence is thus misplaced and possibly even sinful: ‘The monastic movement is an attempt at wanting to be more than a human being, an enthusiastic . . . attempt to be like God.’99 Climacus’s concerns about monasticism also surfaced in Kierkegaard’s reflections about Moravian habits and practices. Indeed, in good Pietist fashion, Denmark’s Moravians constituted a kind of ecclesiola in ecclesia, seeking to build up the larger Danish state church by way of a smaller group of persons dedicated to ‘true’ Christianity. This commitment received lasting expression in the Jutland town of Christiansfeld, which was founded in 1780 as a place dedicated to die einfältige Nachfolge Jesu und seiner Apostel.100 Kierkegaard applauded the Moravians’ insistence on social equality, noting that, unlike the revolutionaries of 1776 and 1789, they are able to attain ‘freedom and equality’ without sacrificing a commitment to order, ‘for uniformity is the essential form’.101 Later, in an 1848 journal entry, he comments that the Moravians are the closest thing to authentic Christians in Denmark, adding that there ‘is much that is beautiful in their lives’.102 And yet, despite such admiration, Kierkegaard is adamant that the Moravians nevertheless fall short of the ideal: ‘The quiet ones actually are a more secular edition of the monastery.’103 That is to say, while the Moravians adopt a certain external deportment – ‘all people [are] alike . . . dressed alike, praying at specified times, marrying by drawing lots, going to bed by the clock’104 – ‘they completely avoid the other danger – suffering for the sake of truth; they shun being led out into the actual Christian situation’.105 What Kierkegaard calls ‘the actual Christian situation’ might be seen as synonymous with striving2, which, it should now be clear, is neither a purely internal state nor a set of external habits and practices that distinguish one as pious. Rather, as Kierkegaard insists in his later writings, true Christian holiness is a matter of imitating Jesus Christ, not by separating oneself from the secular world, but by engaging the secular world in love and, in turn, coming to suffer for it. Thus Kierkegaard borrows from the tradition of imitatio Christi in the Bible and in Christian spiritual literature, albeit with a renewed emphasis on suffering. So strident is this call to suffer that some have accused Kierkegaard of equating imitatio Christi with martyrdom. For example, Marie Mikulová Thulstrup complains that, in Kierkegaard’s authorship, ‘[b]ecoming a sacrifice follows logically from imitation’, thereby framing ‘martyrdom as the mark of the true imitation of Christ’.106 Kierkegaard’s most extreme comments on this subject could lend credence to Thulstrup’s reading, but to take them as definitive would be to treat the exception as the rule. Indeed, what Kierkegaard actually emphasizes is that the follower of Christ

98 99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106

CUP, 433 / SKS 7, 393. CUP, 492 / SKS 7, 446–7. Quoted in Anders Pontoppidan Thyssen, De ældre jyske vækkelser: Brødremenigheden i Christiansfeld og herrnhutismen i Jylland til o. 1815 (Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 1967), 44. Here the German might be translated as ‘the simple imitation of Jesus and his apostles’. TA, 65–6 / SKS 8, 64. JP 3, 2751, p. 211 / SKS 21, NB7:101, p. 130. JP 3, 2751, p. 211 / SKS 21, NB7:101, p. 130. SKP IX B 22. JP 3, 2751, p. 211 / SKS 21, NB7:101, p. 130. Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, ‘Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Imitation’, in A Kierkegaard Critique: An International Selection of Essays Interpreting Kierkegaard, ed. Howard A. Johnson and Niels Thulstrup (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 266–85 [277, 281].

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must strip away the attachments and deceits that prevent her from being open to God’s gracious activity in both herself and the world: ‘[T]here is still only one help in heaven and on earth, this, that God helps . . . But how would God be able to help a person if he is not honest toward God?’107 The fundamental effort of striving2, then, lies in the slow but necessary work of becoming honest before God, not because this honesty is salvific per se, but because it is the ‘action whereby the situation for becoming a Christian comes into existence’.108 As Kierkegaard puts it, ‘No person is saved except by grace . . . But there is one sin that makes grace impossible, that is dishonesty; and there is one thing God unconditionally must require, that is honesty.’109 Not all, of course, will heed this requirement; however, the ones who do will entrust their lives to God’s gracious will, neither seeking martyrdom nor refusing it. Ultimately, it is on this point that Kierkegaard centres his understanding of imitatio Christi. Christ’s suffering and death on the cross are not the explicit goals of striving2; rather, they indicate the courage and perseverance bestowed upon the one who, effacing himself, allows God to reign in him. ‘Imitation must be instilled in order to push to humility,’110 Kierkegaard notes, and so the stress on imitatio Christi in striving2 is best thought of in terms of Christ’s kenotic surrender of the ego in order to fully receive the divine will. Holiness, then, is not a human achievement but the outcome of God’s presence; it does not happen when the human being does something but, rather, when she becomes nothing. Kierkegaard develops this point in a number of his upbuilding discourses, especially those that treat a number of biblical figures as ‘icons’ of Christian faith.111 On his rendering, these persons serve to illustrate the core idea of sanctification: ‘If I were to define Christian perfection, I should not say that it is a perfection of striving but specifically that it is the deep recognition of the imperfection of one’s striving, and precisely because of this a deeper and deeper consciousness of the need for grace.’112 Hence, although striving2 may be seen as a stage after faith, it is, in another sense, an intensification of faith’s reliance on God.

Rest Mystical writers of diverse faith traditions have long theorized that spiritual growth terminates in unity with the divine being. Christianity, in particular, grounds this notion in the incarnation of the Son of God: just as the Son is consubstantial with the Father, so is the purpose of the Son’s incarnation that ‘all [may] be one’ (Jn 17.21) in God. From such statements, later Christian mystics developed a theology of ‘mystical union’. The Syrian monk known to posterity as Pseudo-Dionysius maintained that the goal of the spiritual life is ‘union’ (ἕνωσις) with God,113 while other mystics cast this culminant moment in more metaphorical terms. John of the Cross compared mystical union to ‘spiritual marriage’, poetically writing of the ‘bride’ who ‘rests in delight’114 in her beloved. But this

107 108 109 110 111

112 113 114

CD, 185 / SKS 10, 195. JP 2, 1908, p. 352 / SKS 24, NB25:35, p. 459. CD, 187 / SKS 10, 197. JFY, 198 / SKS 16, 244, my translation. I have recently developed this point in my From Despair to Faith: The Spirituality of Søren Kierkegaard, especially in its fifth chapter, ‘Icons of Faith: The Bible’. Christopher B. Barnett, From Despair to Faith: The Spirituality of Søren Kierkegaard (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). JP 2, 1482, p. 170 / SKS 24, NB22:159, p. 190. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 135. John of the Cross, ‘The Spiritual Canticle’, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991), 469–632 [562].

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image of ‘rest’ is itself famously prefigured by Augustine of Hippo, who not only states that ‘our heart is restless until it rests in [God]’115 but concludes his Confessions by reiterating that ‘we hope to rest in [God’s] sanctification’, since God himself is ‘ever at rest’ and, indeed, is his ‘own rest’.116 There is, then, significant overlap between mystical conceptions of divine union and the invocation of ‘rest’ in spiritual literature. Thus it is intriguing that Kierkegaard himself highlights the importance of ‘resting’ in God – a tendency that raises questions about Kierkegaard’s relation to mysticism.117 After all, while it is true that Kierkegaard treats striving as essential to Christian discipleship, he is equally adamant that the goal of the Christian life is to rest in God. In other words, faith’s striving (both in terms of striving1 and striving2) is a necessary corollary to the flux of temporal existence, but striving itself cannot be faith’s aspiration, since that honour belongs to God. And yet, God is not part of the flux but, rather, absolutely transcends it. As Kierkegaard writes in The Changelessness of God, one of his last published pieces: It is really so that when you, weary from all this human, all this temporal and earthly changefulness and alteration, weary of your own instability, could wish for a place where you could rest your weary head, your weary thoughts, your weary mind, in order to rest [hvile], to have a good rest – ah, in God’s changelessness there is rest [Hvile]!118 This is hardly the only time that Kierkegaard invokes ‘rest’ in his authorship. Perhaps the most notable usage occurs in The Sickness unto Death, where Anti-Climacus argues that, while the self in despair is ‘restless’,119 the self that has faith in God ‘rests transparently in the power that established it’.120 Merold Westphal has cautioned that one must be careful not to treat Kierkegaard’s invocation of ‘rest’ in triumphant fashion,121 and this admonition is doubtless true. However, it would be equally problematic to make the opposite mistake, to maintain that Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christian holiness terminates in struggle and strife, that is to say, does not end at all. Such a position would oppose the broadly Augustinian tradition to which Kierkegaard was drawn – a tradition in which the believer, cast into the flux of time, returns to her eternal origin. Yet, perhaps most importantly, it would neglect a theme not only stressed in Kierkegaard’s own writings but also attested by the words he had inscribed on his tombstone: In yet a little time, I will have won, Then will the whole struggle Be over and done, Then I can rest [hvile] In halls of roses,

115 116 117

118 119 120 121

Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. Ibid., 304. I have recently raised just this issue: see Christopher B. Barnett, ‘ “Rest” as Unio Mystica?: Kierkegaard, Augustine, and the Spiritual Life’, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 16, no. 1 (2016): 58–77. TM, 278 / SKS 13, 336–7. SUD, 73 / SKS 11, 186–7. SUD, 131 / SKS 11, 242. Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith, 255.

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And continually, And continually Talk with my Jesus.122 In placing these words on his grave, Kierkegaard was offering his ultimate word on Christian existence. Indeed, as Johannes Climacus explains, the words on one’s tombstone signify what ‘the dead person calls out’123 from the grave.

CONCLUSION This chapter has sought to unpack Kierkegaard’s understanding of ‘sanctification’, and yet more could undoubtedly be said. After all, the question of ‘holiness’ not only recurs in Kierkegaard’s writings but is linked to several other key Kierkegaardian categories. Moreover, this sort of significance is hardly surprising, given Kierkegaard’s own claim that ‘my entire work as an author revolves around: becoming a Christian in Christendom’.124 For Kierkegaard, as should now be clear, becoming a Christian is never a matter of simply memorizing a creedal formula or of partaking in a church ritual, still less is it a matter of nominally aligning with the members of one’s community or nation. Rather, Kierkegaard insists that becoming a Christian entails daily striving and, through God’s grace, constant growth in holiness. The one who grows in Christian holiness is slowly conformed to the image of Jesus Christ, not in the sense of simulating certain external traits, but in the sense of a profound ‘comm-union’ with God and neighbour. Marks of such a relationship with God and neighbour include humility, patience, faith and selfgiving love. Yet, like others in the Christian spiritual tradition, Kierkegaard would add that this sort of relationship is most profoundly understood as ‘rest’, which thereby stands as the culmination of the Christian’s journey toward holiness.

FURTHER READING Barnett, Christopher B. Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Furnal, Joshua. Catholic Theology after Kierkegaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Mahn, Jason A. Fortunate Fallibility: Kierkegaard and the Power of Sin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Podmore, Simon D. Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Walsh, Sylvia. Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2005.

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Kierkegaard took these lines from one of his favourite devotional writers, the great Pietist hymnist, Hans Adolph Brorson. See Hans Adolph Brorson, Udvalgte salmer og digter, ed. Steffen Arndal (Borgen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab, 1994), 99–101. CUP, 235 / SKS 7, 214. PV, 90 / SKS 16, 69.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

The Holy Spirit: Kierkegaard’s Understated Pneumatology MURRAY RAE

INTRODUCTION Commentators upon the work of Søren Kierkegaard commonly observe that he has little to say about the Holy Spirit. In the whole of his vast corpus, there is only one discourse, comprising a mere fourteen pages,1 in which Kierkegaard directs sustained attention to the work of the Spirit. For the rest, we must make do with a series of ‘scattered and undeveloped references’ which, as Paul Martens observes, make it very difficult to develop any systematic articulation of the role of the Spirit in Kierkegaard’s thought.2 The paucity of explicit reference to the Spirit has led some commentators to conclude that Kierkegaard leaves us with almost nothing to say about his understanding of the Spirit.3 Others contend, however, that Kierkegaard’s strong commitment to an orthodox doctrine of the Holy Spirit undergirds his theological project. Vernard Eller wrote in 1968, ‘Although this is not generally recognized, a very strong doctrine of the Holy Spirit underlies Kierkegaard’s entire concept of faith.’4 More recently, Matthew Frawley has advised, ‘The role of the Holy Spirit is often overlooked in Kierkegaard’s work, perhaps because he mentions the Spirit so infrequently. Yet life in the Spirit should be seen as the ultimate goal of all Kierkegaard’s indirect evangelistic efforts.’5

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I refer here to the discourse, ‘It is the Spirit Who Gives Life’, the third of the three discourses in For SelfExamination, FSE, 71–87. Paul Martens, ‘The Emergence of the Holy Spirit in Kierkegaard’s Thought: Critical Theological Developments in For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA.: Mercer University Press, 2002), 199–222. While focused principally on FSE, Martens’s essay remains the most comprehensive study to date of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the Holy Spirit. Jeremy Walker, for instance, advises that ‘I can say almost nothing about SK’s understanding of this idea’, and laments the ‘serious lacuna’ in Kierkegaard’s work. See Walker, Kierkegaard: The Descent into God (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), 205, cited in Martens, 'The Emergence of the Holy Spirit', 200. Vernard Eller, ‘Faith, Fact, and Foolishness: Kierkegaard and the New Quest’, Journal of Religion 48, no. 1 (January 1968): 54–68 [60]. Matthew Frawley, ‘The Essential Role of the Holy Spirit in Kierkegaard’s Biblical Hermeneutic’, in Søren Kierkegaard and the Word(s), ed. Paul Houe and Gordon Marino (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 2003), 99.

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More confidently still, Varughese John contends that Kierkegaard’s ‘pneumatological understanding, which appears as a small section in For Self-Examination, permeates his entire corpus’.6 The paucity of reference to the Holy Spirit in Kierkegaard’s work may indicate either a lack of interest on Kierkegaard’s part or that the Person and work of the Spirit were not germane to his particular theological concerns. Alternatively, it might be argued that while the Spirit is important to Kierkegaard, he had good reasons to avoid extensive discussion of the Spirit. Arnold Come suggests as much when, after noting that ‘Kierkegaard spoke little and rarely about Holy Spirit’, he explains that this was because ‘the claim of Christian “spirituality” of his day was not of being possessed by but of possessing Spirit in and by oneself, in and by the “congregation” ’.7 Kierkegaard’s suspicion of Hegelian renderings of the Spirit is in view here, renderings which collapse the distinction between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit.8 ‘Actually,’ Come continues, ‘[Kierkegaard’s] doctrine of Holy Spirit is camouflaged in his entire exposition of the faith/love union or relationship with God and of the life of obedience to God.’9 Andrew Torrance agrees that the prevailing Hegelian misconceptions of spirit in the minds of his contemporaries may have contributed to Kierkegaard’s reticence in regard to the Holy Spirit, but he also draws attention to Kierkegaard’s own explanation of why he does not speak much of the Sprit.10 In the context of Christendom, Kierkegaard suggests, the Spirit’s help had become an excuse for a lack of striving. When I underscore the existential in the essentially Christian (alas, not nearly as strongly as the N. T.!) the cry goes up: This is exaggeration, this is law, not gospel. They say: You forget to talk about the Holy Spirit and his aid, for thereby what is heavy becomes light. Fine. So the others have the aid of the Holy Spirit who makes everything light and helps them to – to what? . . . Do their lives express self-denial, renunciation . . .? No, their lives express a pure and simple secular mentality.11 Kierkegaard continues, ‘I have so much respect for the Holy Spirit that I have not dared speak of him because I understand that as soon as I begin doing so I must present the existential even more strongly.’12 Therein lies a challenge for theology today! We shall return in due course to the substantive theological point made here, but, for the moment, these words provide evidence that the paucity of Kierkegaard’s references to the Sprit does not indicate a failure to appreciate the vital role of the Spirit in Christian discipleship. We are encouraged, therefore, to consider with due care and attention what is said about the Spirit in Kierkegaard’s literary output.

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Varughese John, Truth and Subjectivity, Faith and History: Kierkegaard’s Insights for Christian Faith (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 133. Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 344. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard notes that in the Hegelian philosophy ‘the human spirit is the Holy Spirit’, and he comments, ‘What such a philosophy wants is not apparent, since Christ cannot possibly satisfy it.’ CI, 353. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian, 344. See Andrew B. Torrance, The Freedom to Become a Christian: A Kierkegaardian Account of Human Transformation in Relationship with God (London: T&T Clark, 2016), 194–5. JP 6:6792, p. 434 / SKS 24, NB45:28, pp. 468–9. JP 6:6792, p. 434 / SKS 24, NB45:28, pp. 468–9.

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I. THE SPIRIT GIVES LIFE We begin with the third of the discourses in For Self-Examination. That there are three discourses is itself of interest for they are respectively concerned with the three Persons of the Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Spirit.13 Concern with the Father in the first discourse is, admittedly, a little oblique; the discourse is a reflection on the biblical text, Jas 1.22-7, and explains ‘what is required in order to look at oneself with true blessing in the mirror of the Word’.14 The prayer that precedes the discourse, however, is addressed specifically to the Father and makes clear that the Word with which the discourse is concerned is the Word of the Father. To attend faithfully to the Word, therefore, is to attend to the Father and to receive the Father’s gift.15 The second discourse is titled ‘Christ is the Way’, and the preceding prayer is addressed to ‘Lord Jesus Christ’.16 Completing the Trinitarian sequence, the third discourse is titled ‘It is the Spirit Who Gives Life’. The preceding prayer begins, ‘O Holy Spirit’.17 The triune arrangement and Trinitarian substance of these discourses is important to note because it indicates Kierkegaard’s acceptance of the standard Christian confession of God as Father, Son and Spirit.18 Kierkegaard was not a systematic theologian and had no interest in developing a doctrinal account either of the Trinity or of the Holy Spirit, but the orthodox doctrinal position, based on the New Testament, does form part of the conceptual framework within which Kierkegaard undertakes his particular task of clarifying what it is to be a Christian.19 In one of Kierkegaard’s notebooks we have a record of his appreciative reading of Johann Adam Möhler’s Athanasius der Grosse und die Kirche seiner Zeit, besonders in Kampfe mit dem Arianismus and, in particular, of Möhler’s critique of Sabellianism, an early heresy that denied the distinction of the triune Persons. Notable, too, is Kierkegaard’s enthusiastic response to Möhler’s commendation of Hilary of Poitier’s twelve-volume work on the Trinity. ‘It is remarkable,’ Kierkegaard writes, ‘that although I have been engaged with dogmatics for some years now I have never heard them mentioned – they are powerful . . . I absolutely have to read this work, right now I feel that I am flooded by it in the same way that Egypt is blessed by the waters of the Nile.’20 Sufficient indication is given here of Kierkegaard’s appreciation of the Christian

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For further comment on this Trinitarian arrangement of the discourses, see Paul K. Moser and Mark L. McLeary, ‘Kierkegaard’s Conception of God’, Philosophy Compass 5, no. 2 (2010): 127–35 [128–9]. The quoted words are the title of the first discourse. See FSE, 13–14. FSE, 56. FSE, 73. A comparable Trinitarian form is found in the prayer with which Works of Love begins. See WL, 3–4. Sylvia Walsh notes that ‘while [Kierkegaard] affirms the doctrine of the Trinity, it is not an organizing principle of his theology’. See Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 53. In the same place, Walsh points out the considerable difference between Kierkegaard’s approach to the Trinity and that of G. W. F. Hegel and H. L. Martensen, the latter being one of Kierkegaard’s theological teachers and the most influential Danish theologian of Kierkegaard’s time. Per Lønning agrees that ‘the dogma of the trinity does not play a dominating role [in Kierkegaard’s thought], but it can be accentuated clearly enough’. Per Lønning, ‘Kierkegaard as a Christian Thinker ’, in Kierkegaard’s View of Christianity, ed. Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzels Boghandel, 1978), 163–79 [166]. KJN 2, p. 327 / SKS 18, KK:5, p. 357. Towards the end of his life, Kierkegaard expressed similar enthusiasm for Hugo St Victor’s writings on the Spirit. See JP 2:1653, pp. 239–40 / SKS 23, NB15:24, pp. 22–3.

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confession of God as triune for us to interpret his scattered remarks on the Holy Spirit in light of a Trinitarian understanding of God.21 Kierkegaard begins his discourse on the Holy Spirit by distinguishing the Holy Spirit from other kinds of spirit in which people might believe, the spirit of the age, for example, a spirit which he likens to ‘swamp fog’, or the spirit of the world, ‘that powerful spirit – yes, in delusions’.22 Or people might believe in the human spirit, ‘not the spirit in the individual but the spirit of the race, that spirit which, when it is God-forsaken by having forsaken God, is in turn according to Christian teaching an evil spirit’.23 Belief in such spirits is both convenient and undemanding. It ‘bends to every breeze of the times’, while the object of such faith is ‘flimsy’.24 Belief in the Holy Spirit, however, is an altogether different matter. The Holy Spirit is not something of our own making, something that ‘has arisen in the heart of man’,25 as are these other spirits, but is genuinely other and above us, and so makes an unconditional claim upon the person who believes. The distinction made here is especially telling in the light of the widespread contemporary interest in spiritualities that are only loosely connected, if at all, to the Holy Spirit referred to in the Bible. Christian theology has work to do, I think Kierkegaard would suggest, in discerning the spirits. The claim made upon us by the Holy Spirit is expressed, characteristically by Kierkegaard, through the biblical trope of dying to oneself and to the world. The biblical announcement that the Spirit gives life may be welcomed, for which of us does not relish the thought of life, but Kierkegaard warns against the prevailing supposition that the life of the Spirit is merely an enhancement of the life we already enjoy. But is this supposed to be Christianity, this appalling error? No, no! This life-giving in the Spirit is not a direct heightening of the natural life in a person in immediate continuation from and connection with it – what blasphemy! how horrible to take Christianity in vain in this way! – it is new life . . . literally a new life because, mark this well, death goes in between, dying to, and a life on the other side of death – yes, that is new life.26 Readers of Kierkegaard’s work will recognize here a recurring theme. Christian existence – whether it be called discipleship, or whether, as here, it be called new life in the Spirit, involves no less than death and resurrection. This life ‘on the other side of death’ does not refer to whatever life there may be after one’s biological death. It refers, rather, to a life lived now in obedient response to the one who invites us to take up our cross and follow him. Such a life involves dying ‘to every merely earthly hope, to every merely human confidence . . . to your selfishness, or to the world’.27 ‘Dying to’ involves the renunciation of worldly estimations of what it is to make a success of oneself. It involves letting

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Leo Stan observes, ‘Kierkegaard never departs from the basic postulates of the Christian Trinitarian mindset’. See Leo Stan, ‘Holy Spirit’, in Kierkegaard’s Concepts, Tome II: Envy to Incognito, ed. Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15: tome II (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 157. FSE, 74. FSE, 74. See FSE, 75. FSE, 75. The allusion is to 1 Cor. 2.9. FSE, 76. Emphases in original. FSE, 77. For further comment on this passage see David R. Law, ‘Cheap Grace and the Cost of Discipleship in Kierkegaard’s For Self-Examination’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002), 111–42.

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go of that in which we commonly find security and on which we are inclined to stake our identity – material wealth, intellect, the achievements of our professional lives, prowess in some pursuit or other, reputation and so on. The point here is expressed bluntly by the Apostle Paul: ‘For [Christ’s] sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him . . . I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death’ (Phil. 3.8b-10). ‘Dying to’ is a central theme in Kierkegaard’s account of what Christian discipleship consists in. He usually presents the theme in Christological terms as the taking up of one’s cross or as dying with Christ,28 but the theme can also be presented in pneumatological perspective: Death goes in between; this is what Christianity teaches, you must die to. The lifegiving Spirit is the very one who slays you; the first thing the life-giving Spirit says is that you must enter into death, that you must die to – it is this way in order that you may not take Christianity in vain. A life-giving Spirit – that is the invitation; who would not willingly take hold of it! But die first – that is the halt!29 The order insisted upon here – death first, then comes the life-giving Spirit – should not be extrapolated into an ordo salutis. Kierkegaard provides enough evidence elsewhere that the process of salvation takes place entirely at God’s initiative and through God’s enabling. The important point here, however, is that the new life cannot be entered into as long as one clings to the old life. We cannot, for instance, take up Christ’s way of forgiveness as long as we cling to ‘the vehemence of revenge and pride’.30 The two states, life in the Spirit and life lived according to worldly sagacity, are simply incompatible. We must relinquish the latter in order to receive the former. Kierkegaard sees two difficulties here: the first is that we find security in worldly sagacity and are reluctant to trust ourselves to the unknown. We relate to [Christianity] and its demands as we do every other enterprise in life; we believe that we must calculate prudently how far we dare to venture – rather than that we must venture. This is why dying to the world and renunciation are completely abolished, for, after all, on the basis of understanding and prudence it is impossible to decide to will to die to the world; prudence and understanding are diametrically opposed to that.31 The second difficulty is that, in Christendom at least – the residue of which remains powerful in Western culture – we have persuaded ourselves that Christianity is equivalent to being a good person, or merely well-intentioned, while invoking the name of Christ. In this way, for the most part, ‘Christians’ get along just fine in the world and are largely indistinguishable from it. Kierkegaard’s disdain for this counterfeit Christianity is well documented elsewhere and need not be expounded here. Our interest lies in the difference the Spirit makes. What is it that comes after dying to the world? ‘The Spirit

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Practice in Christianity provides the most extensive treatment of this theme, but see also ‘The Gospel of Sufferings’, UDVS, 213–341. FSE, 76–7. TDIO, 15. TDIO, 15.

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comes – and brings the gifts of the spirit, life and spirit.’32 Kierkegaard proceeds to specify and expound three gifts in particular that the Spirit gives, namely, faith, hope and love.33 To begin with faith: Kierkegaard points out that faith is not, as is commonly supposed, a general ‘confidence in oneself, in the world, in mankind, and, along with all this, in God’.34 Such confidence might be considered a ‘natural endowment’.35 ‘But in the stricter Christian understanding it is not faith. Faith is against understanding; faith is on the other side of death.’36 Kierkegaard makes clear repeatedly throughout his writings that faith is a form of existence. It is not an attitude or a disposition but a venture. It is the venture of obedience in response to the call and command of God. A metaphor frequently employed by Kierkegaard suggests that to be a person of faith, you must leave the shore and venture out over the seventy thousand fathoms.37 As Abraham and Sarah left their home and their security in response to the call of God, ‘not knowing where they were going’ (Heb. 11.8); as Abraham set out to Mt Moriah in obedience to God’s command that he should sacrifice his son (Gen. 22.2-30); as the disciples left their nets – their homes, their families and their livelihood – and began to follow Jesus (Mt. 4.18-22), so faith involves letting go of the things in which one has found security and trusting oneself to the call of God. This venture of obedience and trust is what faith consists in. Such faith, Kierkegaard explains, is a gift of the Spirit. It is important to notice here that for all Kierkegaard’s emphasis upon striving, upon venturing, upon suffering and struggle, faith is to be understood after all as a gift. Kierkegaard is keen to correct the widespread delusion that faith asks nothing of us, that it is all ‘as easy as pulling on one’s socks’.38 He therefore insists that we must do something. Our ‘doing something’ turns out in the end, however, to be enabled by the Spirit. Kierkegaard’s claim suggests the need for further work on developing a noncompetitive account of divine and human agency. His work suggests as well that pneumatology will be of critical importance here. It is worth noticing the consistency between what Kierkegaard has to say about faith in For Self-Examination, published under his own name, and what he has to say in the pseudonymous work Philosophical Fragments. In Philosophical Fragments, faith, described first as ‘the condition’ for learning the Truth and later identified as faith, is likewise said to be a gift given by God. Furthermore, in Philosophical Fragments, as in For Self-Examination, faith involves ‘letting go’ of that in which one customarily finds security and assurance. In the case of Philosophical Fragments, the pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, is concerned especially to challenge the absolute confidence we place in our own understanding.39 Such confidence is presented by Climacus as a constraint that stands in the way of faithful discipleship, for it insists that the Christian Gospel be subordinated to the limits of what reason can comprehend before becoming worthy of our allegiance. Such subordination, Climacus recognizes, can only be achieved if the truth of Christianity (and God) is distorted and greatly diminished. Faith is not the consent that

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FSE, 81. For a fuller account of the centrality of faith, hope and love in Kierkegaard’s understanding of what it means to be a Christian, see David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 122–232. FSE, 82. FSE, 81. FSE, 82. See, e.g., SLW, 444; CUP, 203. PC, 35. See especially PF, 42–3.

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reason gives to the claims of Christian faith but a life lived in obedience to the one who is himself the Truth. As C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal both point out, Climacus’s identification of the god-man rather than the Spirit as the giver of faith is immaterial here.40 It is sufficient for Climacus’s purposes to make clear that faith is not a natural endowment and that it must therefore come as divine gift, without Kierkegaard’s later and more precise specification of the Spirit as the giver of faith. Heading off the idea that there might be some contradiction here, Evans reminds us of ‘the unity of the persons of the Trinity, and that the Spirit is referred to as the Spirit of Christ in the New Testament’.41 We might adduce as well the classic Trinitarian principle, opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt (the external operations of the Trinity are undivided). The second gift of the Spirit considered by Kierkegaard in For Self-Examination is the gift of hope. Again, the hope that Kierkegaard refers to here, hope in the stricter Christian sense, namely, hope against hope, contrasts with the more immediate and spontaneous hope that can be a natural disposition. Abraham is again exemplary here. He is the one who is said by the Apostle Paul to have ‘hoped against hope’ (Rom. 4.18), who trusted in the promise of God even in the face of the divine command to sacrifice Isaac on whom his hopes rested. In the face of that command, in the face of that death, all natural hope is extinguished. If hope is to be found in the midst of such darkness, it can only be a hope against hope. Put otherwise, Abraham’s hope, and the Christian hope, is against the understanding.42 That is the hope that the Spirit gives. Such hope is not based on any human calculus which has long ago determined that Abraham’s hope is absurd. The hope given by the Spirit holds fast, rather, to the promise that for God all things are possible.43 A more extensive account of the nature of Christian hope can be found in Works of Love. Reflecting upon the Apostle Paul’s declaration that ‘love hopes all things’ (1 Cor. 13.7), Kierkegaard explains that hope is belief in the possibility of the good, often against all worldly sagacity. It is, furthermore, the fruit of love. To love is to hope on behalf of others. Thus, Kierkegaard advises, Never unlovingly give up on any human being or give up hope for that person, since it is possible that even the most prodigal son could be saved, that even the most embittered enemy . . . could again become your friend. It is possible that the one who sank the deepest . . . could again be raised up. It is still possible that the love that became cold could again begin to burn. Therefore never give up on any human being; do not despair, not even at the last moment – no, hope all things.44 As is so often the case, the challenge Kierkegaard here provides to Christian theologians lies not so much in the need for further conceptual clarity but rather, and more pointedly, in getting theology lived. Kierkegaard does not speak explicitly of the Spirit in his account of what it means to hope all things, but he reminds us repeatedly that ‘hope, the possibility of good, is

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See Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 131, and C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 201. Paul Martens also discusses the ambiguity apparent in Kierkegaard’s work concerning whether it is Christ or the Spirit who provides aid to the believer in coming to faith. See Martens, ‘The Emergence of the Holy Spirit in Kierkegaard’s Thought’, 205n10, 221. Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self, 201. See FSE, 82–3. See Mt. 19.26 and Lk. 1.37. Cf. SUD, 38, 71. WL, 254.

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eternity’s help’.45 While the vocabulary varies, and while Kierkegaard does not often articulate the matter in precise pneumatological terms, a consistent logic concerning the help that God provides runs through his work. Now and again, in accordance with the logic of Trinitarian theology, he attributes the divine help specifically to the work of the Spirit, but in Works of Love, as often elsewhere, it is sufficient for his purpose merely to show first, that ‘to need God is a human being’s highest perfection’,46 and second, that God does indeed offer the help that is needed. The third gift the Spirit brings is love. Kierkegaard does not have a great deal to say in this context about the love the Spirit gives, except that, following the pattern established earlier, he draws a sharp contrast between worldly love and Christian love. This time it is the apostles rather than Abraham who are exemplary. In contrast with worldly love which loves on account of some worthiness it sees in the beloved, the love the apostles had for the world was love offered in the face of persecution and mockery. The apostles learned that Christian love is hated, and spat upon, and crucified in this world, but ‘they joined with God, so to speak, in loving this unloving world’.47 Kierkegaard reiterates his claim: it was ‘the life-giving Spirit [who] brought them love’.48 Faith, hope and love, then, ‘are the gifts the life-giving Spirit brought to the apostles on the day of Pentecost’.49 Kierkegaard concludes, ‘Would that the Spirit might also bring us such gifts – truly they are certainly needed in times like these!’50 It is true, as we have observed above, that Kierkegaard does not speak often of the Holy Spirit, at least not explicitly. But our consideration thus far of what Kierkegaard does have to say about the Spirit indicates that it is a mistake to claim that he neglects the Spirit’s role or that he does not do it justice. Kierkegaard advises frequently throughout his work that the purpose of his authorship was to clarify what it means to be a Christian. In the discourse we have been considering here, we have learned that it is the Spirit who gives faith and hope and love, surely the central features of genuine Christian discipleship. Kierkegaard’s claim about the Spirit is thus of enduring theological importance. It is the Spirit who enables human beings to do the very thing that Kierkegaard considered to be our highest calling – to live our lives before God. Towards the end of his most explicit discourse on the Holy Spirit Kierkegaard offers a parable that adds a further dimension to the role of the Spirit as he understands it. It is worth repeating in full: Once upon a time there was a rich man. At an exorbitant price he had purchased abroad a team of entirely flawless, splendid horses, which he had wanted for his own pleasure and the pleasure of driving them himself. About a year or two passed by. If anyone who had known these horses earlier now saw him driving them, he would not be able to recognize them; their eyes had become dull and drowsy; their gait lacked style and precision; they had no staying power, no endurance; he could drive them

45 46

47 48 49 50

WL, 259. ‘To Need God is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection’ is the title of a discourse written in 1844. See EUD, 297–326. In an earlier discourse, ‘Every Good Gift and Every Perfect Gift Is from Above’, Kierkegaard repeats his confession of our need of God but this time he writes, ‘to need the Holy Spirit is a perfection in a human being’. EUD, 139. FSE, 85. FSE, 85. FSE, 85. FSE, 85.

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scarcely four miles without having to stop on the way, and sometimes they came to a standstill just when he was driving his best; moreover they had acquired all sorts of quirks and bad habits, and although they of course had plenty of feed they grew thinner day by day. Then he called in the royal coachman. He drove them for a month. In the whole countryside there was not a team of horses that carried their heads so proudly, whose eyes were so fiery, whose gait was so beautiful; there was no team of horses that could hold out running as they did, even thirty miles in a stretch without stopping. How did this happen? It is easy to see: the owner, who without being a coachman meddled with being a coachman, drove the horses according to the horses’ understanding of what it is to drive; the royal coachman drove them according to the coachman’s understanding of what it is to drive.51 Kierkegaard then comments, ‘So also with us human beings. When I think of myself and the countless people I have come to know, I have often said to myself sadly: Here are capacities and talents and qualifications enough but the coachman is lacking.’52 What is needed for the living of Christian life – and indeed, as Kierkegaard understands it, what is needed for the living of a truly human life – is the guidance and the enabling of the Spirit. That guidance and that enabling is freely offered by God, but in order for it to become effective, we must first die! We must let go of our worldly sagacity and of the presumption that our natural powers, corrupted as they are by sin, are sufficient for the task of living Christianly before God.53 We might also take Kierkegaard’s words as a salutary reminder that in the theological task, too, we have need of the Spirit’s guidance. Human sagacity is not the basis upon which we may speak faithfully of God. Theology is not invention but should proceed rather in attentiveness to the Word and Spirit of God.

II. BECOMING SOBER The contrast between worldly sagacity and life in the Spirit is the theme of a second discourse, found in Judge for Yourself!, that refers at some length to the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost. Titled ‘Becoming Sober’, the discourse takes as its text 1 Pet. 4.7: ‘The end of all things is near; therefore be prudent and sober so that you can pray,’ but Kierkegaard sets the apostle’s advice alongside the reaction of bystanders to the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost: ‘All were alarmed and doubted and said, “What does this mean?” But others mocked and said, “They are full of sweet wine” ’ (Acts 2.12-13).54 ‘Here as everywhere’, Kierkegaard explains, ‘it is manifest that the world and Christianity have completely opposite conceptions.’55 The discourse goes on to draw sharply the distinction between trusting in God as the apostles did and the worldly sagacity that refuses to venture beyond the realm of human probabilities. That refusal merely demonstrates one’s service 51 52 53

54 55

FSE, 85–6. FSE, 86. Kierkegaard often speaks of the assistance God gives for the life of discipleship, but only occasionally does he attribute that assistance specifically to the Person of the Spirit. See, for example, his reflection on the lilies of the field who neither spin nor sew for it is God who does all the work, FSE, 182–3. See too his observation on the birds of the air who provide an image of the way in which God wants to lift us up, FSE, 183–4. See also the parable of ‘little Ludvig’ who joyfully imagines himself to be pushing his stroller unaware that his mother (representative of God) does all the work, FSE, 185. Cited in JFY, 96. JFY, 96.

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of another master; it demonstrates one’s enslavement to temporal goods that have no enduring value. Life in the Spirit is another matter altogether. Kierkegaard clearly has in mind here those sayings of Jesus that enjoin disciples, or would-be disciples, to venture out beyond the realms of common sense; love your enemies; forgive one another – not merely seven times, but seventy times seven; sell all your possessions and give your money to the poor; take up your cross and follow me. According to the secular mentality, those who do such things are out of their minds. It is as if they were drunk. Taking his lead from 1 Pet. 4.7, however, Kierkegaard insists that it is the secular world that is intoxicated. One of the things the Spirit does, therefore, is bring us to our senses. The Spirit enables us to see things as they really are, and to live our lives in accordance with the way things really are.56 Or so Kierkegaard suggests. The entire relation, in the distinction, spiritually understood, between being sober and being intoxicated is turned around. We began with sensibleness, levelheadedness, and sagacity as being sober, with venturing and venturing to relinquish probability as being intoxicated. But Christianity makes everything new. Thus also here: in reliance upon God, venturing to relinquish probability is precisely what it means Christianly to be sober – just as the apostles on Pentecost Day, were never more sober than when, in defiance of probability, they were simply instruments for God.57 A further feature of the sobriety brought about by the Spirit is that one attains a true knowledge of oneself. ‘To become sober is: to come to oneself in self-knowledge and before God as nothing before him, yet infinitely, unconditionally engaged.’58 To come to a true knowledge of oneself is to recognize that one is nothing without God. It is to recognize one’s need of the guidance and empowerment of God. Recall that this is humanity’s greatest perfection. We are made in the image of God; we are made to live in relation to God. The attempt to go it alone, as did the prodigal son, is precisely our undoing. In claiming, therefore, that to become sober through receipt of the Spirit is to come to oneself, Kierkegaard echoes the story of the prodigal. The turning point in the parable, the moment when the son recognizes that his desperate plight is a consequence of his defiance of the father, is described thus: ‘When he came to himself ’ (Lk. 15.17). In that moment the son recognizes that his only hope is to return to the father. Coming to oneself in selfknowledge is bound up with the awareness of one’s situation before the Father, before God. Such awareness is made possible, according to Kierkegaard, through the gift of the Spirit. Paul Martens thus observes that for Kierkegaard ‘the Holy Spirit is fundamentally involved in culminating the process of becoming a self ’.59 Becoming a self is, of course, a central and pervasive theme in Kierkegaard’s corpus. It is no small claim, therefore, to suggest, as Kierkegaard does here, that becoming a self is crucially dependent on the work of the Spirit. In a world obsessed with self-realization, variously conceived, Kierkegaard’s work challenges Christian theologians to articulate afresh the role the Spirit plays in a true realization of the self.

56

57 58 59

Recall here Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s contention that ‘the point of departure for Christian ethics is not the reality of one’s own self, or the reality of the world . . . It is the reality of God as he reveals himself in Jesus Christ’. Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 56. JFY, 103. JFY, 104. Italics original. Martens, ‘The Emergence of the Holy Spirit in Kierkegaard’s Thought’, 210.

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III. THE TESTIMONY OF THE SPIRIT While the principal role of the Spirit, in Kierkegaard’s account, is to assist in the venture of discipleship, there is also an epistemological aspect to the Spirit’s work. The claim made pseudonymously in Philosophical Fragments – that the condition for learning the truth is given by God – is consistent with what Kierkegaard himself has to say about the Spirit giving understanding.60 Several times in his journals, Kierkegaard refers to the inner testimony of the Spirit as the basis upon which one holds fast to the truth of Christianity. In an extended discussion of the fruitlessness of argument in defence of one’s convictions, Christian or otherwise, Kierkegaard writes, ‘All this talk about world history, arguments and proofs for the truth of Xtnty, must be eliminated. There is only one proof: that of faith.’61 Consistent with his claim elsewhere that faith itself is a gift of the Spirit, Kierkegaard goes on to say, ‘There is only one proof for the truth of Xtnty: the inner proof, argumentum spiritus sancti.’62 The following year, in 1850, Kierkegaard writes, If there were no witness of the Spirit . . . it would be impossible for me to know where I am, whether opposition and misfortune are your fatherly discipline in order to frighten me back, or whether opposition and misfortune simply mean that I am on the right way, the narrow way, where the witness of the Spirit is the only sign.63 The testimony of the Spirit is especially important, Kierkegaard suggests, ‘when the immediate testimony witnesses to the contrary’.64 Kierkegaard appears to have in mind here not only the voices that mock Christian faith and challenge its veracity but also one’s personal circumstances, especially in suffering.65 Presumably, it is such testimony, incomprehensible to others, that sustains Abraham on his journey to Mt Moriah.66 In these appeals to the testimony of the Spirit, Kierkegaard echoes the Protestant Reformers, especially John Calvin, who insisted that the witness of the Spirit provided the only sure basis upon which to trust in the Word of God.67 Calvin writes, The testimony of the Spirit is superior to all reason. For, as God alone is a sufficient witness of himself in his own word, so also the word will never gain credit in the hearts of men, till it be confirmed by the internal testimony of the Spirit. It is necessary, therefore, that the same Spirit, who spake by the mouths of the prophets, should penetrate into our hearts, to convince us that they faithfully delivered the oracles which were divinely intrusted [sic] to them.68

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61 62 63 64 65 66

67

68

Varughese John observes that ‘the Climacean alternative to the Socratic Method for procuring truth anticipates the person and work of the Holy Spirit in Kierkegaard’s Christian writings’. John, Truth and Subjectivity, 136. KJN 6, p. 104 / SKS 22, NB11:179, p. 107. KJN 6, p. 105 / SKS 22, NB11:179, p. 108. JP 2:1656, p. 242 / SKS 23, NB20:40, p. 414. JP 2:1657, p. 242 / SKS 23, NB20:100, p. 447. See e.g. JP 4:4688, pp. 412–4 / SKS 25, NB26:44, pp. 49–51. Compare Job who ‘knows he is innocent and pure in the very core of his being, where he also knows it before the Lord, and yet all the world refutes him’. FT, 207. Merold Westphal likewise contends that Kierkegaard approves the Reformed understanding of the inner witness of the Spirit. See Westphal, ‘Kenosis and Offense: A Kierkegaardian Look at Divine Transcendence’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Practice in Christianity, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon GA.: Mercer University Press, 2004), 19–46 [25–6]. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I. VII. 4, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, 1936), 90.

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Calvin is here concerned especially with the testimony the Spirit provides to the authority of God’s Word as given through Scripture, but he explains elsewhere that the testimony of the Spirit also provides assurance of the individual’s status before God. Kierkegaard is undoubtedly sympathetic to this view. Martin Luther, who is likely to have been the more direct influence on Kierkegaard in this matter, likewise spoke of the witness of the Spirit and affirmed that the individual knows the truth of the Gospel through ‘the testimony of the Holy Spirit in his own person’.69 Appeal to the inner testimony of the Spirit is often considered to be a fragile basis upon which to found any theological claims. While there is certainly need for caution, as Kierkegaard himself displayed in the case of Magister Adler,70 Kierkegaard’s own appeal to the inner testimony of the Spirit invites reconsideration of the role the argumentum Spiritus sancti can play in constructive theological work. There is, however, an essential caveat that Kierkegaard adds to his favourable view of the Spirit’s testimony. The testimony of the Spirit is worthless apart from the venture of faith: ‘A person has to be very far out [beyond the immediate] before he is actually helped by the testimony of the Spirit, he has to be essentially on the way to becoming spirit – and how many are that far out?’71 It is important to note here that the assurance given by the Spirit does not precede the venture of faith; it is not available in advance of obedient response to the divine command. Worldly sagacity, however, works in just the opposite way: ‘It is in the nature of all prudence never to venture more than my understanding tells me I am capable of doing or more than it reckons I will be able to endure in terms of suffering.’72 Worldly understanding does not reckon on the assistance of the Spirit. It does not reckon on the eternal. Christianly conceived, however, understanding – of the trustworthiness of God, for example – develops along with the venturing.

IV. VENTURING THE DECISIVE ACT This talk of venturing takes us again to one of Kierkegaard’s central themes. Readers of Kierkegaard are unlikely to miss the emphasis he places upon venturing the decisive act, upon actually living what one professes to believe. Less attention has been given to Kierkegaard’s claim that in the case of Christian discipleship it is the Spirit who enables the venturing. But as for renouncing the world . . . how in the world will I ever come to attempt such a thing if prudence and understanding are to decide if I will and can or cannot! . . . But the point is that Christianity is the unconditioned – period. If something is the unconditioned and is God’s will and command – then for the second party all responsibility with regard to using prudence ceases – he simply has to obey. This is why Christ promised his apostles a Spirit. Now everything is in order: the disciples are simply to obey, venture – God will take care of the rest.73 Kierkegaard’s reference to Christ’s promise of the Spirit indicates his straightforward agreement with what the New Testament has to say about the Spirit enabling the venture

69 70

71 72 73

Cited in Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 38n13. The Book on Adler offers a critique of Magister Adler who claimed, erroneously in Kierkegaard’s view, to have received a revelation from God. JP 2:1658, pp. 242–3 / SKS 23, NB20:105, p. 449. JP 4:4939, p. 539 / SKS 24, NB25:107, p. 519. JP 4:4939, p. 539 / SKS 24, NB25:107, p. 519.

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of discipleship. In each of the four gospels and in the Pauline epistles, the Spirit is presented as the one who grants understanding and who equips and enables the disciples as they encounter the resistance of the world.74 We noted at the beginning of this chapter Kierkegaard’s reluctance to speak more often of the Spirit for fear of heightening even further the existential demand. To accept the existence of the Spirit, and to recognize that the Spirit ‘transforms a man, renews him, gives him strength for renunciation’,75 leaves one utterly without excuse.76 The evasive objections of prudence are countered by the promise that God gives strength sufficient for the task of discipleship and will sustain the disciple in all things. ‘Here,’ says Kierkegaard, ‘is the difficulty for all of us in Christendom who still have some Christianity. We are unable to deny that such a Spirit exists, that he only waits for us to surrender ourselves completely, and then he will surely take care of the rest. Alas but we dare not.’77 Elsewhere Kierkegaard comments, ‘We are afraid to pray to a Holy Spirit for aid. The matter would become too serious for us if the Holy Spirit actually did come – and help us.’78 Kierkegaard’s famed ‘severity’ is evident here, but what follows immediately upon the lament over our refusal to venture forth in obedience is a reminder of the forbearance and the grace of God: And then comes the hitch that God wants to have something to do with us just the same. And this is what I mean by saying that in Christendom ‘grace’ is applied in the first place, not only ‘grace’ with respect to the past but grace with respect to the venturing that is required. But . . . it is infinitely hard for a person brought up in Christianity from childhood to come out of this, for he is spoiled by ‘grace’ – and yet ‘grace’ is and remains this – that a person is saved.79 Citizens of Christendom have been spoiled by grace to the extent that they have taken it as an excuse not to venture, to renounce nothing, while yet claiming that they are followers of Christ. Despite that failure, however, it remains true that we are saved by grace. For all Kierkegaard’s corrective emphasis upon striving, upon the struggle and the suffering and the high demand of discipleship, he acknowledges repeatedly that everything depends upon grace. ‘Grace,’ he says, ‘is the everlasting fountain – and the Holy Spirit the dispensator.’80 The New Testament usually identifies God rather than the Holy Spirit specifically as the giver of grace and commonly speaks of the ‘grace of Christ’ rather than the grace of the Spirit, but Kierkegaard’s identification of the Spirit as the dispenser of grace might encourage further reflection on how the principle of the unity of the works of the triune Persons ad extra can accommodate the attribution of particular works to the respective Persons. Meanwhile, Kierkegaard’s attribution to the Spirit, here and elsewhere, of powers and prerogatives that belong to God adds weight to the claim

74 75 76

77 78 79 80

See for example, Mt. 10.19-20; Mk 13.11; Lk. 12.11-12; Jn 15.18–16.13; Rom. 8.1-17; 1 Cor. 12.1-11. JP 6:6832, p. 463 / SKS 25, NB27:43, p.156. The point is repeated in JFY, 75: ‘One cannot speak about there being a holy spirit and about believing in a holy spirit without binding oneself by one’s words, and furthermore, not without binding oneself to the holy spirit in renunciation of the evil spirit – this is altogether too earnest, that there is . . . a holy spirit.’ JP 6:6832, p. 464 / SKS 25, NB27:43, p.156. JP 2:1660, p. 243 / SKS 24, NB24:80, p. 370. Cf. JP 6:6862, p. 581 / SKS 25, NB29:23, p. 312. JP 6:6832, p. 464 / SKS 25, NB27:43, pp. 156–7. JP 2:1654, p. 241 / SKS 23, NB15:114, p. 80.

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made earlier that his theological thinking is set firmly within a Trinitarian understanding of God.

V. THE SPIRIT AS COMFORTER It is in connection with grace that Kierkegaard speaks of the Spirit as Comforter, a title taken from the New Testament.81 The comfort provided by the Spirit does not absolve the disciple of the requirement to die to, however, or provide a means to avoid suffering. The opposite is true. ‘Why is the Holy Spirit called the Comforter?’ Kierkegaard asks. ‘When the sign of the relation to God is suffering, when God’s loving me has its very expression in my having to suffer . . . then there must be a “Spirit” in order to comfort.’82 Likewise, in For Self-Examination Kierkegaard asks, ‘When does the Comforter come? He does not come until all the dreadful things that Christ has prophesied about his life have happened, and likewise the appalling things he has predicted regarding the lives of the disciples – then comes the Comforter.’83 Kierkegaard is insistent that comfort is given by the Spirit to those who die to the world, who strive and who suffer because of their obedience to Christ. ‘The Spirit is the Comforter. It is not only vitalizing, enabling power for “dying to the world” – but is also the Comforter in relation to “imitation”.’84 Don’t reach out for the comfort, Kierkegaard warns, before beginning the striving. That would be one further manifestation of the craftiness with which human beings seek the benefits of Christ while avoiding the invitation to take up their cross and follow him.85 Kierkegaard’s ‘severity’ is again evident here, but in a discourse titled, ‘One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and Is Victorious – in That God Is Victorious’, Kierkegaard expresses the same point in a more tender and encouraging tone. The imagined audience for his discourse is the reader who genuinely has struggled. To that reader Kierkegaard offers reassurance: while the Comforter does not come immediately to the sufferer’s aid, he does come and ‘makes everything new, strips the sufferer of his mourning apparel and gives him a new heart and an assured Spirit’.86

VI. THE SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH Among the things for which Kierkegaard is best known, we must list his trenchant criticism of the Danish Church, and especially of its clergy. His unrelenting critique of the church was directed, however, not against the church as it is conceived theologically in the New Testament, but rather against the counterfeit form, so Kierkegaard believed, of the church in his own day. Daphne Hampson draws a helpful contrast between the established church, the subject of Kierkegaard’s critique, and ‘what might reasonably be called a “confessing church” ’.87 It was the latter, Hampson suggests, that

81 82 83 84 85

86 87

‘Comforter’ is a common translation of the word Paraclete used in John’s gospel to speak of the Spirit. JP 2:1661, pp. 243–4 / SKS 25, NB26:40, p. 46. Cf. JP 2:1662, p. 244 / SKS 25, NB27:49, p. 161. JFY, 81. JP 2:1919, p. 360 / SKS 25, NB27:44, p. 158. Kierkegaard elsewhere rebukes the ‘deceitful comfort that thinks that the Comforter is coming immediately’ before any striving has begun. EUD, 465. EUD, 396. The Hongs note an allusion here to Ps. 51.10-12. See EUD, 532. Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 287.

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Kierkegaard looked for, yet despaired of finding in his own day. It must be admitted however, that such ecclesiology as Kierkegaard may have had must be read between the lines of his literary output. This led H. L. Martensen to allege that Kierkegaard’s Christianity was in no way a social faith ‘but a private religion pure and simple, a Christianity in which the Christian Church and the activity of the Holy Spirit has been left out’.88 Contra Martensen, I have tried to make clear above that the Spirit is an essential feature of Kierkegaard’s theology. But what of the role of the Spirit in forming and sustaining the church, and of establishing the koinonia (communion) that is a prominent feature of the church as described in Acts 2? The truth is, Kierkegaard has little to say about that. He does recognize, however, that one of the fruits of Pentecost is the establishment of the church: Think about this festival day! It was indeed the Spirit who gives life who today was poured out upon the apostles . . . This was demonstrated by their lives, their deaths, to which testimony is given by the history of the Church, which came into existence precisely because the Spirit who gives life was communicated to the apostles.89 Kierkegaard also recognizes that the congregation gathers in worship and, prompted by the Spirit to seek the fellowship of Christ, can itself provide a witness to the forgiveness and reconciliation that Christ offers. We see this in the discourses written for the Communion service on Fridays.90 The first, on Lk. 22.15, speaks of the longing for the Lord’s supper that is prompted by the Spirit,91 while in the prayer preceding the sixth discourse, on 1 Jn 3.20, Kierkegaard writes, ‘How would we not, then, in faith praise and thank and worship you here in your holy house, where everything reminds us of this [forgiveness and reconciliation], especially those who are gathered here today to receive the forgiveness of sins and to appropriate anew reconciliation with you in Christ!’92 These snippets, along with others that could be adduced, provide indications – no more – of Kierkegaard’s awareness of the work of the Spirit in creating fellowship. That he did not have more to say about this matter would be judged a fault had Kierkegaard set out to write a doctrinal treatise on the Sprit. But he did not. He sought, rather, to offer a corrective to the enormous illusion93 in Christendom that one became a Christian merely by going along with the crowd. Kierkegaard emphasized, by contrast, the importance of the single individual’s existence before God. Not until the concept of the single individual had been rightly understood could one then speak of the congregation.

88

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91 92 93

H. L. Martensen, Berlingkse Tidende (28 December 1854), cited and translated by Bruce Kirmmse in ‘The Thunderstorm: Kierkegaard’s Ecclesiology ’, Faith and Philosophy 17, no. 1 (2000): 87–102. For all his appreciation of Kierkegaard, Karl Barth likewise sharply criticized the absence of any ecclesiology. ‘Where in his teaching’, Barth asks, ‘are the people of God, the congregation, the Church?’ Karl Barth, Fragments Grave and Gay (London: Collins, 1971), 99. FSE, 77. There are seven discourses published under the title ‘Discourses at the Communion on Fridays’ and reproduced in CD, 247–300. These seven communion discourses, together with six other communion discourses, are found in Søren Kierkegaard, Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). CD, 253. CD, 289. See PV, 23.

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And insofar as there is the congregation in the religious sense, this is a concept that lies on the other side of the single individual; the single individual must with ethical decisiveness have gone in between as the middle term in order to make sure that the congregation is not taken in vain as synonymous with ‘the public,’ ‘the crowd,’ etc., although we still must remember what is well-known, that it is not the single individual’s relationship to the congregation that determines his relationship to God, but it is his relationship to God that determines his relationship to the congregation.94 This is a contentious claim deserving of further critical reflection. It is at least apparent, however, that Kierkegaard’s corrective emphasis on the individual’s relationship with God assumes that there will also be a relationship with the congregation which, as noted already, it is the work of the Spirit to establish.95 In an age when individualistic interpretations of Christian faith along with suspicion of the institutional church are widespread, theology must stress again that new life in the Spirit involves the establishment of a new communion not only with God but also with one’s neighbour. Kierkegaard does not offer much assistance for that task, but his recognition that those who gather to worship provide a witness to the reality of forgiveness provides a helpful lead.

VII. THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT Our reluctance to die to the world represents, in Kierkegaard’s view, a failure to heed the Spirit. That is one thing, but open defiance of the Spirit is another. As Anti-Climacus explains, in the sin against the Holy Spirit the self ‘not only discards Christianity totally but also makes it out to be a lie and untruth’.96 The matter can be expressed Christologically: the sin against the Holy Spirit is the denial that Christ is the paradox, the presence of God with us in time.97 This sin, Anti-Climacus suggests, ‘is the highest intensity of despair’.98 It constitutes a denial of one’s true self as a self before God who is in need of forgiveness, who is forgiven and who is called to follow Christ. One of the saddest expressions of the sin against the Holy Spirit is the refusal of this forgiveness. There was a person . . . who confessed he had sinned against the Holy Spirit . . . and that for him there was no mercy. Perhaps the sin against the Holy Spirit was rather the pride with which he would not forgive himself. There is also a severity in condemning oneself and not wanting to hear about grace.99 Simon Podmore explains that such despair is a ‘form of pride or self-assertion: an implicit belief that “only I can judge how much of a sinner I am and only I can declare whether I am forgiveable” ’.100 The Holy Spirit offers release from this delusion, but, as Kierkegaard insists, only if we will allow it.

94 95

96 97 98 99 100

PV, 265. Italics original. On Kierkegaard’s understanding of the relationship between the Spirit and the church, see Paul Martens, ‘The Emergence of the Holy Spirit in Kierkegaard’s Thought’, 219–21. SUD, 125. See SUD, 131. SUD, 125. JP 4: 4029, pp. 112–3 / SKS 23, NB15:94, p. 66. Simon D. Podmore, ‘Kierkegaard as Physician of the Soul: On Self-Forgiveness and Despair ’, Journal of Psychology and Theology 37, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 174–85 [183]. Podmore’s article provides an astute analysis of this manifestation of despair.

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VIII. THE PERSON OF THE SPIRIT All that Kierkegaard has to say about the Spirit is predicated upon the belief that the Holy Spirit is the divine Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity. Kierkegaard prays to the Spirit and addresses the Spirit directly as God, often within an explicitly Trinitarian frame.101 He also speaks of ‘God as Spirit’ who comes as the Comforter.102 He refers to the Spirit interchangeably with God, as, for instance, in the discussion of the ‘inner witness of the Spirit’ which he also refers to as the ‘witness of God’.103 He speaks in a number of places of the work of the Spirit taking place in concert with the Father and the Son. A journal entry from 1852 addresses this theme at some length, culminating in the following explanation: ‘It is not the Spirit who leads to the Son and the Son who leads to the Father; no, it is the Father who directs to the Son, the Son who directs to the Spirit, and not until then is it the Spirit who leads to the Son and the Son who leads to the Father.’104 This Trinitarian understanding of the Spirit provides support for Claudia Welz’s observation that Kierkegaard is loyal to the early Christian creed, which describes God as three hypostaseis – an interpersonal communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Since the Spirit is also regarded as a ‘person’, one cannot separate God’s ‘personality’ from his omnipresence as Spirit and declare the latter to be a nonpersonal power.105 This divine identity of the Spirit is undoubtedly important for Kierkegaard. It is the basis of his confidence that the Spirit is the one who gives life; who inspires and enables the venture of discipleship; who provides comfort in the face of suffering; who gives the gifts of faith, hope and love; who testifies to the forgiveness and the grace of God; and who lifts the self from despair. As a young theological student Kierkegaard professed his appreciation for the writings on the Trinity by the fourth-century church father Hilary of Poitiers. Hilary himself says little of the Spirit in De Trinitate, but he does have this to say, ‘I will not trespass beyond that which human intellect can know about Thy Holy Spirit, but simply declare that he is Thy Spirit. May my lot be no useless strife of words, but the unwavering confession of an unhesitating faith!’106 That, I suggest, is a confession that Kierkegaard would approve. It also provides salutary guidance for all who would engage in the theological task.

FURTHER READING Frawley, Matthew. ‘The Essential Role of the Holy Spirit in Kierkegaard’s Biblical Hermeneutic’. In Søren Kierkegaard and the Word(s), edited by Paul Houe and Gordon Marino, 93–104. Copenhagen: Reitzel, 2003.

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See above the discussion of the prayers preceding the three discourses in FSE. A prayer drafted initially for inclusion in SUD provides another example (see SUD, 141), as does the prayer preceding WL (see WL, 3). JP 2:1661, p. 243 / SKS 25, NB26:40, p. 46. See e.g. KJN 6, p. 105 / SKS 22, NB11:179, p. 108. JP 2:1432, p. 138 / SKS 25, NB27:23, p. 142. Claudia Welz, ‘Difficulties in Defining the Concept of God: Kierkegaard in Dialogue with Levinas, Buber and Rosenzweig’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 80 (2016): 61–83 [70]. Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, Book XII, 56, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 9, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2012), 233.

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Martens, Paul. ‘The Emergence of the Holy Spirit in Kierkegaard’s Thought: Critical Theological Developments in For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!’. In International Kierkegaard Commentary: For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself!, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 199– 222. Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 2002. Stan, Leo. ‘Holy Spirit’. In Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Tome II: Envy to Incognito, edited by Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, 157–61. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15: tome II. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Torrance, Andrew B. The Freedom to Become a Christian: A Kierkegaardian Account of Human Transformation in Relationship with God. London: T&T Clark, 2016.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Faith: The Infinite Task of Passionate Belief MATTHEW F. WILSON AND C. STEPHEN EVANS

INTRODUCTION This chapter identifies some of the most pertinent aspects of Kierkegaard’s concept of faith for those interested in understanding Kierkegaard’s theology. The topic of faith is one of the most widely discussed in the Kierkegaardian corpus, and not surprisingly, it is also extensively covered in secondary literature. Synthesizing all of Kierkegaard’s ideas about faith would therefore be an impossible task for a single chapter. We have decided to focus on a number of topics that will be familiar to those well-versed in Kierkegaard studies, while also attempting to look at Kierkegaard’s conception of faith in a fresh way. The chapter is divided in two parts. Section I discusses Kierkegaard’s conception of how faith and reason interact, focusing on the tension between the two but arguing that the tension does not mean that faith and reason are ultimately opposed. We explore the ways that Kierkegaard understands faith to be ‘against’ reason, the extent to which it is, and why he thinks the tension must be resolved either in faith or offence. We also explain how the tension between faith and reason can be both conceptual and practical in nature. Section I concludes with a discussion of Kierkegaard’s important claim that the opposite of faith is offence rather than doubt. There we develop Kierkegaard’s idea that faith is a type of passion and not merely a belief state. Section II shifts gears to focus attention on the ways that Kierkegaard thinks faith is an ongoing activity, a never-completed task. We do this primarily by examining two conditions that Kierkegaard thinks are necessary if one is to come to faith. First, we examine Kierkegaard’s idea of infinite resignation, a requirement for faith that is not yet faith itself. Then we examine Kierkegaard’s claim that faith requires a type of decision or ‘leap’. We argue that this second condition does not mean that Kierkegaard’s concept of faith is non-orthodox or Pelagian. Nor does it make him a direct volitionalist, who thinks we can acquire faith simply by an act of will. Rather, the Kierkegaardian ‘leap’ of faith must be understood as a response to the uncertainty that exists in the historical foundations of Christian faith and the need to close deliberation regarding that uncertainty. Faith requires a ‘leap’ because faith must express itself in change in a person’s life.1

1

In selecting the topics to cover, we have ignored several important themes and distinctions that Kierkegaard makes. Many of these will be of interest for those who want to study further Kierkegaard’s theology of faith; chief among these is what Kierkegaard calls Socratic faith, or the faith that is found in ‘religiousness A’. The definitive discussion of religiousness A is found in CUP, 385–525, and a helpful overview in C. Stephen Evans,

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I. FAITH AND REASON There are of course many uses of the term ‘faith’ in philosophical and theological contexts, but one of the most common centres on the formation of beliefs that are grounded in trust for another person. Thus, if a friend tells you that he will help you repair your car next Saturday, and if you trust your friend, you may form a belief that he will help you repair your car next Saturday. Christian theology’s concept of faith also centres around trust, though it is a complex dispositional state of the person that typically includes beliefs and a willingness to act in certain ways as well. Although faith is primarily trust in God, a person who trusts God will typically have certain beliefs about God (particularly that God is good) and also a willingness to believe what God says, if God speaks to humans. A person of faith also will manifest a willingness to act on the basis of God’s promises and obey God’s commands. So although faith is primarily trust, it normally includes belief as well and typically shows itself in actions. This certainly seems to be how Kierkegaard conceives of faith. It is noteworthy that the Epistle of James, which affirms that ‘faith without works is dead’ (Jas 2.14–26), seems to have been Kierkegaard’s favourite book of the Bible.2 Discussions of the ‘problem of faith and reason’ usually focus on the ‘belief ’ aspect of faith. In this context the term ‘reason’ usually represents what humans can come to believe or know by the unaided exercise of the human intellect – that is, reasoning that is without the aid of any special divine revelation. The term ‘faith’, by contrast, generally represents an acceptance and appropriation of truth that has been received through special revelation, and at least some of these truths are usually thought to be ones that unaided human reason would be unable to reach.3 It is often claimed that faith and reason can and do come into conflict with one another. A tension could arise if faith is understood as calling a believer to accept some claim that seems unreasonable, or to act in ways that appear unreasonable. Thus, the question of how one should think about this apparent tension has been a common starting point for theological discussions of faith. Some theologians have argued that the tension is merely apparent4; other thinkers (usually not theologians, of course) have argued the conflict is real and intractable.5 Kierkegaard certainly thought that there can be, and frequently is, a tension between faith and reason. We begin, then, by discussing this tension, attempting to understand why Kierkegaard sometimes speaks of faith as believing ‘against reason’ or ‘against the understanding’. This tension between faith and reason can be both conceptual and practical in nature.

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Kierkegaard: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 110–38. We have also provided a list of helpful (but far from exhaustive) references at the back of this chapter for those who wish to study Kierkegaard’s concept of faith further. See Richard Bauckham, ‘Kierkegaard and the Epistle of James’, in Kierkegaard and Christian Faith, ed. Paul Martens and C. Stephen Evans (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 39–54. Theologians commonly distinguish between general and special revelation, where special revelation is revelation that is received through God’s specific acts in human history, including the prophetic and apostolic interpretations of those acts. General revelation, by contrast, refers to ways that God may be known apart from his acts in human history. In our discussion of divine revelation that follows, we intend to refer to special revelation. For a good example, see Murray Rae, Kierkegaard’s Vision of the Incarnation: By Faith Transformed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). For examples, see Louis Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity (University: University of Alabama Press, 1984), 136–7, and also Herbert M. Garelick, The Anti-Christianity of Kierkegaard (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), 25–8.

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We will try to show that Kierkegaard holds a ‘perspectival’ view of human reason and that the tension between faith and reason arises when human reason is shaped by the perspective of sin or ‘worldliness’. There is also, we shall argue, a perspective (the perspective shaped by faith) in which faith and reason are on good terms. Section I concludes with our examination of why Kierkegaard thinks the tension between faith and reason must be resolved either in faith itself or in offence. Faith and offence are both passions, and there is a sense in which neither is more ‘reasonable’ than the other. Neither is the product of the intellect alone.

Historical Perspectives: Faith as below, above or against Reason Broadly speaking, theologians have responded in three ways to the apparent conflict between faith and reason. First, there are those who have assumed that faith is below reason. These thinkers argue that divinely revealed truths must be viewed in the light of what is ‘reasonable’ to believe. Religious doctrines or teachings that are unreasonable, incomprehensible or seemingly immoral must therefore be rejected or reinterpreted according to reason. Faith is free to accept revealed truth only so long as it does not conflict with what is ‘rational’. This is one way, then, that faith can be ‘against’ reason; but here whenever the two conflict faith is subordinated to the rational.6 Kierkegaard, as we shall see, does not give priority to reason in this way; he always gives priority to faith over reason if the two are thought to conflict. There are two ways that one might give priority to faith over reason. One is represented by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas argued that faith can grasp truths that are above reason. On this view, faith is not seen as necessarily antagonistic to reason. Rather than being against reason, faith is thought to augment, enhance or come to the aid of reason. When the object of faith is trustworthy, then what a person of faith believes should still be considered rational, even though the truths believed might be beyond the powers of reason. Aquinas thinks that God’s gift of faith is a gracious power that perfects man’s natural rational capacities, and thus the antagonism between faith and reason is not fundamental.7 Kierkegaard certainly agrees with this view that some of the truths of faith are beyond the power of reason to comprehend. Indeed, he sometimes describes his view in terms very similar to those used by Aquinas.8 However, Kierkegaard does not merely affirm that faith is above reason but often maintains that faith is against reason.9 Faith should not be

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Early modern Western thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza and John Locke held this kind of view. The title of one of Kant’s books expresses the idea nicely: ‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.’ See Immanuel Kant, ‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason’ and Other Writings, ed. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, intro. Robert Merrihew Adams, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, Q. 2, Art. 3–4. See, for example, a passage where Kierkegaard quotes approvingly from Hugo de St Victor. In the passage Hugo maintains that although there are truths of faith that reason cannot fully grasp, there is still something ‘by which reason becomes determined or is conditioned to honor the faith which it still does not perfectly succeed in grasping’. See JP 1:7, p. 4 / SKS 23, NB15:25, p. 23. For further discussion of this point see C. Stephen Evans, Faith beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account, Reason and Religion Series (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 85–6. For a discussion of this theme in Kierkegaard, see Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman, 2014), 220–1. C. Stephen Evans also discusses the theme of ‘faith against reason’ in Kierkegaard in chapter 7 of Faith beyond Reason, 93–113.

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thought of as something that simply perfects human nature; rather faith is something that overcomes human nature. Kierkegaard goes so far as to say that faith requires the ‘crucifixion of the understanding’.10 He regularly describes that which faith believes (or that which faith requires) as ‘unreasonable’,11 ‘absurd’,12 ‘foolishness’13 and a ‘paradox’.14 This has caused some interpreters to go so far as to think that Kierkegaard is advocating a kind of irrationalism (an interpretation we will argue against in the next section). Regardless, Kierkegaard clearly takes seriously the idea that there is some kind of natural tension between faith and human reason. In the next two sections, we explore why Kierkegaard thinks this is the case.

Kierkegaard on Faith and Theoretical Reason: Conceptual Tensions A divine revelation may require a person to believe something that cannot be fully understood because reason is unable to conceptualize the ideas presented. There may be something about the revelation itself that appears contradictory (to unaided reason). If this happens, unaided reason will reject the concept as unreasonable. Kierkegaard thinks the most important example of this type of conflict is contained in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. In the Fragments and Postscript, Johannes Climacus argues that when reason attempts to comprehend the idea of the ‘god-man’, it is unable to grasp how any individual could be both divine and human. Climacus calls the idea of the god-man the ‘absolute paradox’: ‘The thesis that God has existed in human form, was born, grew up, etc. is certainly the paradox sensu strictissimo, the absolute paradox.’15 Reason cannot comprehend the paradox. Human thought reaches towards it but finds something that it ‘cannot think’.16 Climacus calls the paradox absolute because of ‘the absolute difference’ between human nature and the divine nature.17 There are a number of reasons why unaided reason or the understanding naturally tends to recoil from believing in the incarnation. First, the incarnation affirms what seems to be a ‘contradiction’ because Christ is seen as both God and human and these categories appear to be mutually exclusive. Since God is eternal and humans are temporal, it is not easy to see how one being could be both eternal and temporal.18 Such an idea may simply seem impossible to reason. (We shall argue, however, that what seems to be the case is not necessarily known to be the case and that Kierkegaard does not in fact see the incarnation as logically contradictory and therefore logically impossible.) Climacus even describes the incarnation in ontological terms, saying that the paradox is that God can become historical ‘against [His] nature’.19 Climacus repeatedly claims that the absolute paradox can only be believed ‘against the

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CUP, 564. FT, 17. FT, 37, 40, 48–50. PF, 39, 52, 102. FT, 69–75; PF, 37–9, 50–2. CUP, 217. PF, 37. PF, 44–7; CUP, 412–13, 492. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard describes the absolute difference as the ‘most chasmal qualitative abyss’, SUD, 122, and the ‘infinite qualitative difference’, SUD, 126–7. From the perspective of ‘reason’, the absolute difference appears to be metaphysical in nature. However, in PF Climacus says that the ‘absolute difference’ is not metaphysical but is constituted by sin. PF, 47. CUP, 574. CUP, 578, cf. 512.

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understanding’ and that ‘if anyone fancies that he understands this [the incarnation], he can be sure that he misunderstands it’.20 If faith believes what seems to go against reason, one might think that it follows that faith must be irrational. Several interpreters of Kierkegaard have made this charge against Kierkegaard.21 The critique of Kierkegaard as an irrationalist assumes that reason is a kind of neutral, disinterested judge that examines faith and finds it intellectually deficient. Reason as an objective, detached faculty is supposed to provide a reliable gauge of truth. Such a view sees ‘reason’ as a kind of timeless and unconditioned faculty that humans possess. Kierkegaard rejects this view of reason, and thus his claim that faith is ‘against’ reason should not be understood as the claim that faith goes against the findings of such a timeless, objective faculty, for no such faculty exists in humans. Reasoning, for humans, is an activity engaged in by historically situated human beings, and what seems ‘reasonable’ will always reflect the character of the humans who are doing the reasoning. Specifically, for Kierkegaard there is a vast difference between what seems reasonable from the perspective of what might be called ‘worldly wisdom’, that is, what seems reasonable to sinful humans and what seems right to the person of faith. There is no such thing as the perspective of reason for Kierkegaard, and thus there is no intrinsic or inherent opposition between reason and faith. Kierkegaard admits, even insists, that there is a tension between faith and human reason, which is manifested in a strong tendency on the part of human reason to recoil from faith. However, this tension is not an absolute or intrinsic tension between faith and reason per se but a tension between faith and human reason as it historically exists, shaped by human sinfulness. There is, therefore, a long tradition of arguing that Kierkegaard is not an irrationalist.22 The historical character of human existence for Kierkegaard implies that ‘reason’ and ‘reasonable’ are ambiguous terms. The concept of reason is a mixed concept, partly normative and partly descriptive. To say that a person’s thinking is ‘reasonable’ is to say that her patterns of thinking mirror the way a person should think, because it is likely to lead to truth. However, to put such a normative concept to work it must have descriptive content; one must have some idea as to what actual patterns of thinking are likely to reach the desired goal. When one looks at actual human reasoning one cannot find a single pattern or a set of patterns that ought to be followed or that all thinking should conform to. What has been considered reasonable has differed radically at different points in history and in different cultures. For example, the philosophies of David Hume, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel give different accounts of ‘reason’ that are all mutually incompatible. Kierkegaard consistently contrasts the patterns of thinking that are considered reasonable by the worldly mind from the patterns that make sense to a person of faith. A fine example comes from Johannes de Silentio’s description of Abraham’s decision to emigrate from his native land: ‘He [Abraham] left one thing behind, took one thing along: he

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CUP, 579. For two examples, see Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 106–8; Brand Blanshard, ‘Kierkegaard on Faith’, in Essays on Kierkegaard, ed. Jerry H. Gill (Minneapolis: Burgess, 1969), 113–26. Many Kierkegaard scholars including David F. Swenson, Alastair McKinnon, Cornelio Fabro and Niels Hansen Søe have argued for the claim that Kierkegaard is not an irrationalist. For more recent and extensive treatments of this topic, see chapter 7 of C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays, Provost Series (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006); chapters 2, 6 and 7 of Evans, Faith beyond Reason; and chapters 5 and 11 of Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith.

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left behind his worldly understanding, and he took along his faith. Otherwise he certainly would not have emigrated but surely would have considered it unreasonable.’23 One concrete way that Kierkegaard thinks that this ‘worldly’ understanding differs from the reasoning of a faithful person centres around the question of whether there are limits to human reason. Kierkegaard recognizes that, if reason is unwilling to recognize any limits, then anything it cannot comprehend will seem to be ‘against’ it (from its own perspective). Here we can see that Kierkegaard is claiming that if the truths of faith are above reason they will also be in tension with human reasoning that does not recognize its limits. A reason that refuses to recognize the possibility that there may be some truths that it cannot discover on its own is already making an implicit claim to be without limits. This kind of reason possesses a domineering quality that wants to be the master of all knowledge and truth.24 Such a faculty is far from being something purely objective or disinterested. Special revelation, by definition, purports to be a source of truth that comes from outside reason. If such revelation cannot be fully understood, and if reason, when it tries to understand it, finds that it appears contradictory, then ‘natural’ reason, shaped as it is by sin, will have a strong tendency to reject it or be against it. We can therefore interpret Kierkegaard’s ‘against reason’ thesis to mean that the incarnation is incomprehensible in relation to and from a particular human perspective. But that does not mean that the paradox is an intrinsic contradiction or what some philosophers call a formal logical contradiction.25 Kierkegaard addresses this point in Practice in Christianity when his pseudonym Anti-Climacus argues that the ‘God-man’ is a sign of contradiction. As a sign, there ‘must be something by which it draws attention to itself ’, and something by which it may point beyond itself. Utter nonsense cannot act as a sign. To be a sign of contradiction, he says, ‘the contradictory parts must not annul each other in such a way that the sign comes to mean nothing’.26 Thus Kierkegaard does not think the concept of the god-man is a logical contradiction; it is only a ‘sign of contradiction’. If the contradiction were logical, it could not act as a sign. One can also see that Kierkegaard is not an irrationalist because he argues that people must make use of reason in delineating and isolating the paradox in thought. Reason is what recognizes the absolute paradox as an idea that it cannot think. Reason also distinguishes the paradox from other kinds of absurdities and ‘nonsense’.27 Kierkegaard expounds on this point in a journal entry in which he says, ‘not every absurdity is the absurd or the paradox. The activity of reason is to distinguish the paradox negatively – but no more.’28 Reason, then, is responsible for isolating the concept of the incarnation and recognizing that it can only be believed by faith. Finally, Kierkegaard does not think that what faith believes is chosen arbitrarily. If that were the case, one might claim that arbitrariness is evidence of irrationalism. He thinks 23 24

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FT, 17. This conception of reason is clearly described in chapter 3 of Philosophical Fragments, as well as in ‘Offense at the Paradox (An Acoustical Illusion)’, the appendix to that chapter. For a detailed exposition see C. Stephen Evans, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s ‘Philosophical Fragments’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), particularly chapters 5–7. For a detailed argument that Kierkegaard does not consider the incarnation to be a formal or logical contradiction, see C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s ‘Fragments’ and ‘Postscript’: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1992), 212–19. (This volume has been reprinted by Prometheus Press.) PC, 125. CUP, 504. Italics added, JP 1:7, p. 4 / SKS 23, NB15:25, p. 23.

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that divine revelation is (or should be) accepted on the basis of its religious authority. Authority provides a rational grounding for accepting a stated truth as divinely revealed. In The Book on Adler, Kierkegaard argues that reason must be involved in recognizing religious authority, because not every claim to divine revelation can be authoritative. There he identifies criteria by which a person might recognize a purported divine revelation as authentic, and the application of such criteria requires the use of reason.29 It is interesting to note that Kierkegaard contends one mark of a genuine revelation is that it ‘did not arise in any human heart’.30 In other words, Kierkegaard thinks that it is reasonable to expect that revealed truths will be paradoxical, at least to persons of faith. Thus Kierkegaard affirms that it may be more rational to accept some claims to divine revelation over others while simultaneously affirming that the content of a given revelation may not be understandable by reason.31 In summary, Kierkegaard claims that faith’s acceptance of the absolute paradox of the incarnation is truly described as ‘against reason’. However, he does not see faith’s acceptance and appropriation of this Christian truth as intrinsically irrational. Reason will see what faith believes as irrational insofar as it strives to dominate or assumes its own unlimited power. But this does not mean that there is something logically contradictory in doctrines like the incarnation. Reason actually has a positive role to play in receiving revelation and accepting its authority; faith’s acceptance of divine revelation as divine is not arbitrary. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard does think that certain revelations, and the incarnation in particular, will always remain paradoxical if considered by human reason alone.

Kierkegaard on Faith and Expectation: Practical Tensions The tension between faith and reason does not lie merely in a person’s theoretical understanding. Faith’s conflict with reason can also be pragmatic; it may conflict with people’s expectations about their futures and how they think they should act. God might ask people to expect things (and do things) that are against what human experience teaches people to reasonably expect and do. In this section we will explore Kierkegaard’s account of faith’s expectancy and how it may conflict with reason. Kierkegaard contends that a person may come to expect something about the future in one of two ways. The first is through a kind of inductive reasoning process: a predictive, calculative thought process that extrapolates from past experience and forms expectations about the future. Kierkegaard identifies this type of reasoning when he speaks of a person setting her expectations by ‘inference’, ‘guessing’ and ‘calculation.’32 Second, a person may form expectations by faith. Such expectations are founded on a trust in God and in his promises. Because these two ways of forming expectations have fundamentally different bases, it may happen that faith’s expectations are perceived by reason as irrational or unreasonable.

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See C. Stephen Evans, ‘Kierkegaard on Religious Authority: The Problem of the Criterion’, in Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 239–60. PF, 109. The issue of religious authority is also discussed in Paul Martens, ‘Kierkegaard and Apostolic Authority ’, in Kierkegaard and Christian Faith, ed. C. Stephen Evans and Paul Martens (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 55–72. EUD, 18–19.

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The conflict between faith and reason, especially with regard to expectations, can be clearly seen in Johannes de Silentio’s discussion of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. God promises Abraham that he will have a son and that through that son he will be the father of a great nation. Abraham and his wife conceive, naming their new son Isaac. But the story takes a dramatic twist when God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham obeys, taking his son to Mt Moriah to perform the sacrifice. As Silentio tells the story, Abraham, in faith, never stops believing that he will still be the father of a great nation through Isaac.33 Abraham expects that he will somehow get Isaac back. When Abraham finally binds Isaac and raises his knife, God interrupts the act and commands Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead. Silentio remarks that Abraham’s trust in God’s promise and willingness to obey earns Abraham the title of the ‘father of faith’.34 Silentio recognizes that the Abrahamic story can only be described as ‘terrifying’35 or ‘madness’36 if understood from a perspective outside of faith. In other words, the story illustrates perfectly how faith can expect something that seems irrational to the ordinary human understanding.37 Abraham expects by faith that he will get Isaac back. But Silentio contends that Abraham could have believed this only ‘by virtue of the absurd’.38 One might speculate that Abraham thought that God was testing him; or perhaps he believed that God would raise Isaac from the dead. Either way, Silentio argues, there is no basis in human experience or ‘human calculation’ to make it rational for Abraham to believe as he does.39 Human experience teaches that once people are dead they remain that way. Apart from faith and trust in God, who is able to do what seems impossible to humans, Abraham has no basis to expect an outcome other than Isaac’s death. God’s promise to Abraham and the subsequent command to sacrifice the son who was promised generate a type of practical paradox for Abraham. The paradox is obviously different from the conceptual paradox of the god-man; it is not ‘absolute’ in the same sense. Abraham does not expect the ‘impossible’ in a conceptual sense; it is conceivable that someone might come back from the dead. Nevertheless, Abraham’s faith expects something that human experience teaches is ‘impossible’.40 It is an ‘impossibility’ given what we know about human beings. Thus, seen from a perspective outside of faith, Abraham’s expectation is ‘irrational’ in the same way that it would be irrational for someone to jump out of an airplane with no parachute and expect to live. Silentio affirms that human reason is actually correct when it thinks that Abraham expects the ‘impossible’, summarizing, ‘[T]he understanding continues to be right in maintaining that in the finite world where it dominates this having was and continues to be an impossibility. The knight of faith realizes this just as clearly; consequently, he can be 33 34 35 36 37

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Cf. Heb. 11.17. FT, 55. Cf. Rom. 4.16, cf. Heb. 11.8. FT, 75, 77. FT, 16–17. One of the primary themes found in Fear and Trembling is the way faith can require one to ‘suspend’ one’s ethical reasoning processes, or what Kierkegaard calls ‘the teleological suspension of the ethical’, in order to obey God’s commands. FT, 54. This theme has been discussed extensively so we have chosen instead to focus on the issue of expectancy here. FT, 36–7, 40, 48–50. FT, 35. FT, 16. There is a parallel here with the ‘impossibility’ of the incarnation, since it is also human experience that suggests to us that someone who appears to be an ordinary human being could not be God.

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saved only by the absurd, and this he grasps by faith.’41 This tension presents itself as another dimension to the tension that appears between faith and human reason as it actually functions. Of course, Silentio argues that Abraham’s faith in God was ‘unreasonable’ even before God gave the command to sacrifice Isaac.42 Abraham’s decision to leave his homeland already did not make sense to ‘worldly understanding’. For he expected that, no matter what happened in his life, no matter where God took him, it would somehow be for his good; that he would be ‘victorious’. Abraham’s faith anticipated the New Testament promise that ‘all things must serve for good those who love God’.43 Abraham’s life thus points to how faith and reason may form expectations differently. Faith expects ‘victory’ in all circumstances, and this is unreasonable from a merely human perspective. Kierkegaard discusses the concept of faith’s expectancy at length in his Upbuilding Discourses. Three discourses are particularly relevant: ‘The Expectancy of Faith’ (1843), ‘Patience in Expectancy’ (1844) and the ‘The Expectancy of Eternal Salvation’ (1845).44 In these essays Kierkegaard argues that faith has a particular kind of evaluative stance regarding what it expects of the future: it expects ‘victory!’ But such an expectation cannot be based on what one learns through everyday experience. The hurts, losses and disappointments of the past make it reasonable that one should expect similar losses in the future. But Kierkegaard argues that the expectancy of faith is victory, and this expectancy is not based on past experience; it is grounded in God’s promises. The most perplexing aspect of faith’s expectation of victory is that it is not based on anything particular occurring in the future.45 Reason cannot understand this. ‘Victory’ is a term of positive evaluation, where some anticipated outcome is achieved or a conflict is positively resolved. Reason only knows how to declare a victory if it can verify that a particular expectation has been met according to some empirical criterion.46 If ex hypothesi no such criterion is available, then reason thinks it unreasonable to expect victory. Faith, by contrast, expects victory in all circumstances. Kierkegaard says that faith expects ‘victory in all strife, in all spiritual trials, because experience had taught that there could be 41 42 43 44 45

46

FT, 47. FT, 17–18. Rom. 8.28. See Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. EUD, 27. Cf. George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses (London: Routledge, 2002), 50. There is a tension here between the Upbuilding Discourses and Fear and Trembling, since in the latter it does seem that Abraham believes something specific. This may reflect the more ‘generic’ form of religiosity present in the Upbuilding Discourses, since it does seem that Christian faith, like Abraham’s, involves some expectations about specific promises being fulfilled. However, the difference is not absolute, since the Christian does not know exactly what form ‘eternal life’ will take, or precisely what God’s promises mean or how they will be fulfilled. Thus, the Christian also holds that God’s love is not refuted by any specific empirical events. Kierkegaard formulates reason’s objection in this way: ‘An expectancy without a specified time is nothing but a deception; in that way one may always go on waiting; such an expectancy is a circle into which the soul is bewitched and from which it cannot escape.’ EUD, 23. Robert C. Roberts has called this the ‘circle objection’. He interprets it to mean that if an expectancy is not specified in time (which he equates to its verifiability conditions), then it is not really an expectancy at all. In other words, since the expectancy is not specified, it is doing ‘no work’. See Robert C. Roberts, ‘The Virtue of Hope in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003), 181–203. But if Roberts is right, then faith really is not expecting anything at all, even though it thinks it is. There is reason to think that this interpretation is not correct. People commonly (and genuinely) expect things from their futures without specifying times or places for those expectations. People may reasonably expect to get married, have children, die, etc., all without defining their expectations in terms of particular times or places. Thus the paradoxical nature of faith’s expectancy does not seem to lie in its genuineness qua expectancy.

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battle . . . but with the help of faith, it expects victory in all of them’.47 This expectation of victory contradicts those expectations based on experience. These teach a person that hopes will be disappointed, hurts will happen and people must be ‘prepared for a certain degree of unhappiness’.48 The question, then, is what sense can one make of Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘victory,’ especially in the midst of life’s hurts and disappointments? Kierkegaard does not think that faith’s expectation is blind to disappointment. He admits that a believer may at times ‘look at his life with sadness and pain’.49 He also thinks that a certain acquaintance with disappointment is a proper part of maturing.50 Kierkegaard’s conception of victory, then, is distinctly theological. It is based in God’s promise that, ‘as Scripture so earnestly and so movingly teaches us, all things must serve for good those who love God’.51 The believer says, ‘There is an expectancy that the whole world cannot take from me . . . since I did not believe that the world would keep the promise it seemed to be making to me; my expectancy was not in the world but in God.’52 This expectancy, then, is not based on worldly wisdom but on God and his promises. Faith’s concept of victory is not that a person’s life will be a series of ‘victories’ in the sense that all of one’s hopes and wants will be satisfied. Rather, Kierkegaard contends that ‘faith expects only one [victory], or more correctly, it expects victory’.53 Faith expects that no matter what kinds of experiences or difficulties one encounters, they will all contribute to one’s total good. It trusts that each future life event will be a constitutive part of one victorious life. Here it is important to note that Kierkegaard thinks faith’s expectation of victory is still an expectation for this life;54 Christian faith’s expectation is not merely for victory in the eschaton, though Kierkegaard clearly affirms that one’s victory does not end with death. But this raises a question about what Kierkegaard would say about the faith of those who faced martyrdom. In what sense could they have expected ‘victory’ in this life? We think that Kierkegaard might answer this question by pointing to the many martyrs who saw their own deaths as a kind of final good or achievement they were able to attain in life. There are numerous stories of saints who, while going to their death, did so rejoicing and thankful for the opportunity to partake in the same sufferings as their Lord.55 But obviously this concept of victory is not something reasonable from the perspective of worldly understanding. Therein lies another natural tension between reason and faith. Reason (often) cannot comprehend how particular events, especially those that cause pain or suffering, can be a constitutive part of one’s good.56 And faith acknowledges this fact. Nevertheless, faith’s expectation is that the tension will someday be resolved, and that

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

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EUD, 21. EUD, 21. EUD, 24. He chides the person ‘who does not know life’s dangers’, saying that ‘his courage is only a scarcely praiseworthy foolhardiness, and the person who does not know life’s deceit – his expectancy is an intoxication in dreams’. EUD, 212. EUD, 19. EUD, 24. EUD, 21. This theme is also present in Fear and Trembling. See below, Section II, the subsection on ‘Infinite Resignation’, for a further discussion of this point. Many examples can be found in Rev. Alban Butler, The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and other Principal Saints (New York: D. & J. Sadlier, 1846). The reader may notice that the tension between faith and reason in this sense is related to what has historically been called ‘the problem of evil’ in philosophy of religion.

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in eternity ‘your life will become transparent to you . . . in blessed understanding with your God and with yourself, undisturbed by that troubled passion that seeks to guess the riddles of providential dispensation’.57 In other words, one’s expectation of victory includes the expectation that one’s life will someday be fully understandable as victorious in eternity’s ‘blessed understanding’. Faith thereby recognizes that its expectation may seem unreasonable, but it is not intrinsically so.58

Faith, Doubt and Offence In the previous two sections, we discussed different ways that faith can be against human reason. In this section, we will discuss Kierkegaard’s important claim that this conflict is always resolved in either faith or offence, not doubt. Kierkegaard argues that questions about God, immortality and the future are too important, and too personal, for humans to address dispassionately. He thinks a person is only fooling herself if she wants to confront such questions merely as an objective and neutral spectator. Thus, Kierkegaard argues, the human response to divine revelation is always an impassioned one. He frequently describes faith as a kind of passion59 and claims that the opposing passion is not doubt, but offence. In Practice in Christianity Anti-Climacus says, ‘there is a confused discussion of doubt’ with regard to Christianity because ‘the practice has been to use the category “doubt” where the discussion ought to be about offence’. Therefore a person’s relation to Christianity ‘is not to doubt or believe, but to be offended or to believe’.60 To explain why Kierkegaard thinks this, we must pause briefly to say something about how Kierkegaard uses the term ‘passion’. For Kierkegaard, passions are connected to the emotions, the will and human action. Reflection alone does not lead to action.61 He agrees with Hume that merely knowing that something is good or some act is right would not suffice to bring about action. A person must want to do what is right or good. A person’s actions stem from the heart, and to speak of the heart is to speak of what people care about: what they love, fear, desire and so on. So passion is essential to human action and therefore to human life. Passion is connected to what we feel and to our conscious life, which Kierkegaard calls ‘immediacy’. However, there are two importantly different kinds of immediacy. Kierkegaard distinguishes between ‘natural’ kinds of immediacy, which are momentary and episodic in nature, and a higher form of immediacy. The former kinds of immediacy (feelings, moods, momentary cravings, etc.) occur in everyone. This must be distinguished from the higher kind of immediacy, sometimes called the ‘second’ or ‘new’ immediacy, or ‘immediacy after reflection’.62 The former are the kinds of desires, wishes, hopes and fears

57 58

59 60 61 62

EUD, 216. We have modified the translation of this passage slightly. John Davenport and Sharon Krishek both emphasize the aspect of faith that is ‘trust in divine promises’, which is a central feature of what it means to expect victory. Davenport emphasizes especially the ‘eschatological’ component of such trust. See John Davenport, ‘Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling’, in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, ed. Edward F. Mooney (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 203–6; Sharon Krishek, Kierkegaard on Faith and Love (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5–6, 14, 46, 76, 130. For example, ‘the highest passion in a person is faith’. FT, 121. PC, 81n. See the long discussion about the relation between thinking, acting and being in CUP, 318–43. See, for example, TA, 65; FT, 60; CA, 10. Gregor Malantschuk provides an excellent overview of Kierkegaard’s use of ‘immediacy’ (both the first and second kinds) in his note on ‘Immediacy’ in JP 2, pp. 594–5. The note lists examples from almost every published book of Kierkegaard.

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that naturally and spontaneously occur and develop in humans, and which change from moment to moment. The second, or higher kind of immediacy, is made up of the types of enduring passions that can give shape to a person’s life over time. Kierkegaard’s favourite non-religious example is a great lover, someone whose love endures and shapes his or her whole life. It is such enduring passions that shape a person’s identity. Kierkegaard thinks that those who lack such enduring passions really lack any clear identity, since they change from moment to moment through the immediate passions that rule them. Kierkegaard even at times describes such a person as someone who simply lacks a self. Faith for Kierkegaard is not a natural form of immediacy but a type of higher immediacy, or immediacy after reflection. This means that faith is a passion that can be formed or developed over time. Faith is ‘immediate’ in that is manifests itself through emotions such as the fear of doing evil, a love of the good and righteousness, and sorrow over sin. However, faith, as an enduring passion, also has a dispositional character. A person of faith does not cease to have faith at some moment just because the person is not at that moment thinking about God or feeling any particular emotion. As an enduring passion, faith does not come and go in that way. Faith is a complex inner state that manifests itself both in emotions, beliefs and actions.63 As we shall show in the next section, achieving faith is an ongoing task, and one of the ways faith is cultivated is through learning to think in certain ways about oneself, God and the world. The role of thought in developing faith is why faith is a form of ‘immediacy after reflection’. Christian faith is the passion that shapes the life of a person who has been transformed by an encounter with the God-man. Such a Christian will think differently, act differently and have a disposition to have different emotions than the person would who lacks faith. When this passion is present, reason recognizes its limits and gratefully trusts in a God who cannot be fully understood. Let us now return to the concept of offence, which for Kierkegaard is the opposite passion to faith. The source of offence lies in reason’s natural disposition to want to have the final say on knowledge and truth, as discussed above. Reason naturally has a domineering quality that wishes to explain or make intelligible whatever it does not know, and it strives to make the mysterious explicable. It continually searches for the unknown, ‘that [which] thought itself cannot think’, in order to bring this unknown into its understanding. Kierkegaard calls this seeking quality a ‘passion fundamentally present everywhere in thought’.64 Reason, then, is not something merely calculative, neutral or objective; it is passionately active as it seeks to conquer unknown mysteries and make them understandable. Insofar as reason thinks that nothing is beyond its limits of understanding, it will reject any claim that there is ultimate mystery in the universe. A claim to ultimate mystery is a source of offence against reason’s own abilities. Thus, when a divine revelation shows itself to be something that cannot be understood, reason’s claim to authority is rebuked, and offence is the result. Kierkegaard summarizes this nicely in a journal entry where he states, ‘It is claimed that the arguments against Christianity 63

64

Robert C. Roberts discusses emotions and what he calls ‘emotion-dispositions’. It is tempting to describe faith as an emotion-disposition, but this might obscure the fact that faith manifests itself in beliefs and actions as well as emotions. See Robert C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Robert C. Roberts, Spiritual Emotions (Grand Rapids: William. B. Eerdmans, 2007). PF, 37. Strictly speaking, this passage (and those we discuss in what follows) should be attributed to Johannes Climacus. However, it is worth noting that Kierkegaard originally intended to publish Philosophical Fragments under his own name, with the pseudonym added at the last minute, with only a very few changes to the text. PF, xv–xvi. Hence we think that these texts can safely be regarded as capturing Kierkegaard’s own thought.

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arise out of doubt. This is a total misunderstanding. [They] arise out of insubordination, reluctance to obey, mutiny against all authority.’65 In other words, if reason is unwilling to recognize any other authority, it will be offended at revelation’s claim to authority. This rebellion, Kierkegaard argues, is a form of sinful pride. Offence is, thus, reason’s ‘natural’ reaction to Christian revelation, but this is only because of sin. Kierkegaard does not think that offence is a more ‘rational’ response than that of faith in some objective sense. Nor must reason respond by being offended. It is possible for the human understanding to ‘surrender itself ’, to ‘step aside’ or be ‘discharged’.66 It is important that reason itself is the one who steps aside or surrenders; put in other terms it is reasonable for reason to recognize its own limits. Reason may let go of its claim to authority and be ‘taken captive’ by revelation.67 If this happens in response to divine revelation, Kierkegaard calls it the ‘happy passion’ of faith. Once a person is inside the perspective of faith, faith’s conflict with reason is then, at one level, resolved. A person may happily (and passionately) hold to God’s revelation while relinquishing reason’s claims to ultimacy. Nevertheless, faith recognizes that its beliefs and expectations, grounded as they are in the wisdom of God, continue to look foolish from the perspective of human wisdom. In that sense, faith continues to recognize that what it believes is ‘against’ reason.

II. CONDITIONS FOR FAITH We have discussed Kierkegaard’s contention that a natural tension exists between faith and reason and explained why this produces a response of either faith or offence. Since faith is a passion, it would, however, be incorrect to conclude that Kierkegaardian faith is primarily about what one believes or expects simply at one point in time. One of the more important contributions Kierkegaard makes to the topic of faith is his claim that faith is not something that one can ever arrive at or be finished with. Faith is a type of activity or task that is always ongoing. This activity includes believing and expecting, but it also manifests itself in actions and emotions. To pursue the task that is faith, Kierkegaard argues that certain conditions must be present. These conditions shed further light on the active and appropriative aspects of faith. In what follows, we show how Kierkegaard’s concept of ‘infinite resignation’ is a condition for faith that also illuminates what faith is not. Then we turn to Kierkegaard’s famous claim that faith requires a decision or ‘leap’.

Infinite Resignation One of the preconditions for faith is what Kierkegaard calls ‘infinite resignation’, which requires that a person be willing to resign all of his or her attachments to finite goods and goals. These must be given up necessarily if one is to relate properly to God in faith. (Furthermore, Kierkegaard thinks that this willingness will at some points actually demand giving something up.) In Fear and Trembling, Johannes de Silentio argues that the ‘movement of infinite resignation’ is a precondition for faith, saying that this movement is ‘that last stage

65 66 67

JP 1:778, p. 359 / SKS 20, NB:121, p. 87. PF, 54, 59. PF, 48.

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before faith, so that anyone who has not made this movement does not have faith’.68 The movement involves a willingness to give up one’s loves, desires and will for the sake of God.69 Resignation is not primarily a movement of the intellect; thus resignation is even more existentially demanding than mere reason’s ‘stepping aside’. Silentio describes infinite resignation as a person giving up the relationships and things that she loves most in the world if this is required; in resignation a person is willing to give up her finite attachments for the sake of ‘the eternal’ and in order to obey God. In Postscript, Climacus describes resignation as a willingness to surrender one’s goals or ends. There Climacus describes faith as ‘simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to one’s absolute τέλος [end, goal] and relatively to relative ends’.70 One must be willing to resign or give up all finite goals (one’s relative ends) in order to relate oneself absolutely to an eternal happiness or God (one’s absolute τέλος). Resignation is required for faith because if a person is not willing to surrender her finite goals and attachments, she will not be able authentically to pursue an eternal happiness. Climacus argues that an eternal happiness cannot be pursued in the same way one pursues finite goals like ‘a good job, a beautiful wife, health, the rank of a councilor’.71 In order to relate oneself absolutely to the absolute (i.e. to God), these other goals must be resigned infinitely. Climacus summarizes this thought when he says, ‘If [the goal of eternal happiness] does not absolutely transform his existence for him, then he is not relating himself to an eternal happiness; if there is something else he is not willing to give up for its sake, then he is not relating himself to an eternal happiness.’72 Infinite resignation is thus a movement that must occur if one is to relate oneself absolutely to God. And this relating oneself absolutely to God is a precondition for faith. The renunciation of finite goods and goals is a prerequisite for faith, but infinite resignation should not be confused with faith itself. Returning to Fear and Trembling, Silentio argues that the movement of resignation gives up the finite, but, paradoxically, the movement of faith expects to receive the finite back. Silentio states, ‘Through resignation I renounce everything . . . by faith I do not renounce anything; by faith I receive everything.’73 Faith conceives of this receiving back in both temporal and eternal terms. Silentio is skeptical of any concept of faith that resigns everything in this life and only hopes for the eternal; he thinks that faith concerns one’s present life as much as it concerns one’s life in the eschaton. Abraham, for example, believes that by ‘virtue of the absurd’ that he will get Isaac back in this life. Likewise, Silentio’s knight of faith ‘find[s] pleasure in everything . . . [and] the finite tastes just as good to him’.74 And as we already saw in Kierkegaard’s expectancy discourses, faith always expects victory in this life: ‘If expectancy does not, then it is fraudulent, the craftiness of a sick soul that wants to sneak out of life, and is not the authentic presence of a healthy soul in the temporal.’75 Faith, then, is a

68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75

FT, 46. In Postscript, Johannes Climacus sometimes describes infinite resignation more formally as a willingness to give up all finite goods for the sake of the ‘Absolute’, but it is clear that the Absolute here must be identical to God. CUP, 387, 431. CUP, 391. CUP, 393. FT, 48–9. FT, 39–40. EUD, 259. Climacus also confirms this idea in Postscript when he claims that infinite resignation cannot mean that the ‘existing person becomes indifferent to the finite’. CUP, 413. As noted earlier, however, there is a

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double movement. Where resignation is a form of giving up, faith is both a giving up and an expectation of receiving back. In summary, the movement of infinite resignation is the movement by which one gives up one’s loves, goals and desires if this is necessary, so that one can relate absolutely to God. In relating absolutely to God, however, one does not stop being concerned with the temporal. Faith’s requirement is only that one relativizes all finite goods in comparison to one’s absolute good, God. This process is continual; the faithful person must continually make the movement of infinite resignation as she continually lays holds of faith. She must continually loosen herself from worldly attachments in such a way that she is always prepared to let go of them whenever they conflict with her pursuit of God. Thus, seeing that infinite resignation is the movement that always precedes and accompanies but never is identical to faith helps us understand why faith is a task for a lifetime.

Decision and ‘the Leap’ Kierkegaard affirms orthodox views of faith that conceive faith as a gift that God graciously bestows upon believers. In the Fragments, Climacus makes it clear at many points that God gives a person ‘the condition’ to believe in the absolute paradox, and this condition is faith.76 Nevertheless, Kierkegaard also affirms that faith requires a kind of decision, which he sometimes describes as the ‘leap’.77 In this section, we will examine the role that a person’s decision or ‘leap’ plays in overcoming the historical uncertainty that surrounds Christianity. Kierkegaard views Christianity as a historical religion grounded on the truth of certain historical events. Specifically, Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, is the divine Son of God. Jesus is a man who is reported to have performed miracles and made astounding claims about himself. Without such ‘signs’ there would be no reason to think that Jesus was indeed God. But on Kierkegaard’s view, historical claims cannot be proven, and a narrative about such historical events can never be objectively certain. Kierkegaard argues that all historical knowledge can only, and at best, be an ‘approximation’ to truth. He also claims that there can never be any ‘direct and immediate transition’ from historical knowledge, no matter how certain, to faith.78 There is a qualitative transformation involved when a person makes the transition to faith, and that transformation involves a ‘leap’. In Postscript, Climacus proposes a thought experiment where his reader is asked to assume that ‘there has been a successful demonstration of whatever any theological scholar in his happiest moment could have ever wished to demonstrate about the Bible’.79 In other words, we are to suppose that every historical event in the Bible could be proven with utter certainty. Climacus asks, ‘What then? Has the person who did not believe come a single step closer to faith? No, not a single step. Faith does not result from straightforward scholarly deliberation, nor does it come directly; on the contrary, in this

76 77

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tension between the lack of specificity present in what is expected in the Upbuilding Discourses and the specific promises Abraham believes in Fear and Trembling. PF, 15, 18, 62–3, 65. It is true that the phrase ‘leap of faith’ never occurs in Kierkegaard’s writings. However, Kierkegaard uses the term ‘leap’ to refer to any qualitative transformation in a person which is free in the sense that it is not an inevitable result of the past. In that sense, faith clearly requires a ‘leap’. CUP, 49. CUP, 28.

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objectivity one loses that infinite, personal, impassioned interestedness, which is the condition of faith.’80 The thought experiment is supposed to illustrate two important features of Christian faith. First, Climacus wants to make sure that people do not identify faith with propositional belief. Faith indeed has a ‘what’ (propositional content), but when it comes to Christian faith, propositional belief is never enough. Faith is always a passionate response to that ‘what’, and this response requires personal interestedness and appropriation. It requires that the individual ‘venture everything’.81 If one had certain knowledge about the events, one would not thereby have faith. In fact, Kierkegaard seems to see objective knowledge, which can be gained from a detached perspective, as incompatible with faith, which requires a willingness to risk everything on the basis of a risky belief. Climacus even suggests that if the historical events surrounding Christ’s life could be proven with complete certainty, it would be dangerous to a person’s faith. If the evidence were overwhelming for a person of faith, ‘much fear and trembling [would] be needed lest he fall into temptation and confuse knowledge with faith’. Climacus contends that the uncertainty in Christian faith is a ‘beneficial taskmaster’ that keeps one ‘passionately’ believing, and ‘if passion is taken away, faith no longer exists . . . [because] certainty and passion do not hitch up as a team’.82 A second feature of Christian faith that Climacus’s thought experiment illustrates is the logical gap that exists between historical facts and the theological claims about Christ. Kierkegaard does not think that Christ’s miracles, even if proven, would logically entail that he is God. One cannot validly argue from historical premises to theological conclusions, and historical facts do not prove theological facts. Thus, even if a person had no objection to the statement that Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, it does not follow from that statement that Christ is of the same essence as God. Likewise, a person can accept Christ’s resurrection as a historical certainty without accepting the further claim that he is the Son of God. There is a logical gap between the historical events which are a part of Christian history and theological claims about the person of Christ.83 Christian faith therefore involves crossing both of these gaps. Existentially, the gap is between intellectual assent and appropriation. Knowledge or belief in the events surrounding Christ’s life does not automatically translate into the appropriation of his teachings. Resolution and decision are required for a person to put that teaching into action. A person must decide to ‘venture everything’. Likewise, there is a logical gap between Christianity as a record of historical events and as source of theological truth. There is no direct entailment relation between Christ’s performing miracles to his theological claim to be God. Even though people might not have taken Christ’s claims seriously without his performing miracles, these miracles alone do not form a logical bridge to the claim to be God. Kierkegaard thus argues that crossing from one side to the other must involve the will. Since faith is a gift from God, this act of will is not one that human persons can create on their own, but the qualitative transformation is also not something that simply happens to humans without their willing involvement.

80 81 82 83

CUP, 29. CUP, 429. CUP, 29. Kierkegaard’s discussion on these points follows several arguments made by the German philosophertheologian Gotthold Lessing (1729–1781). Merold Westphal discusses these two gaps and Lessing’s thought further in his Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith, 197–205.

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Kierkegaard’s account of faith or belief is complicated by the fact that he distinguishes what we might call ordinary historical faith or belief from Christian faith, faith in the ‘eminent sense’.84 However, the two are related since much of what is true of ordinary historical faith is also true of Christian faith, which includes historical content. Both kinds of faith require will, but Kierkegaard does not think a person can simply directly or consciously will to believe any historical statement, even for ordinary historical belief.85 Even less is it possible for a person to simply decide, relying on his or her own power, to believe in the God-man, since the historical beliefs in question are paradoxical. Kierkegaard holds that all human beliefs about contingent historical facts require the involvement of the will, since such facts cannot be proved or demonstrated. The evidence is never sufficient to prove or demonstrate the belief, and thus scepticism is always available at least as a logical possibility. Most of us are not sceptics, however, because of the will: we do not want to be sceptics. In the case of Christian faith or belief, the logical gap between historical evidence and belief is vastly larger since the historical beliefs in question are ones that are paradoxical and will seem absurd to the person in the grip of offence. However, in claiming that beliefs are shaped by the will, Kierkegaard does not mean that people can simply form a belief by forming an intention to have the belief. Rather, he means that what people in fact believe is partly shaped by what they want, what they hope, what they fear and what they love. How much control do humans have over what they believe? Nowhere does Kierkegaard say that beliefs can be controlled by the will directly, a position sometimes referred to as direct volitionalism. Kierkegaard is rather best interpreted as advocating a kind of indirect volitionalism. This is the thesis that the choices a person makes can (and often do) play a role in the beliefs that he or she ends up with. These choices could include, for example, the decision to pray, to stop or start church attendance, or to read the Bible. Most important for our discussion is the choice to end deliberation. Kierkegaard holds the view that deliberation does not end itself.86 A person must decide to stop deliberating, and the decision must be motivated by something. One can always go on seeking further evidence or reconsidering the evidence that one already has. Returning to the case of Christian belief, Kierkegaard thinks it is possible to deliberate endlessly about Christianity and never come to a decision. A person could endlessly consider arguments for and against Christ’s claims to be God, and so, out of a desire to achieve certainty, he or she may never come ‘to the point of venturing at all’.87 To bring deliberation to a close is a choice, and if one is to passionately appropriate the claims of Christianity, deliberation must end. This does not mean that one cannot thoughtfully reflect on Christianity’s claims both before and after becoming a Christian. But insofar as a person is in the process of deliberating Christianity’s truth, one cannot also be appropriating Christ’s teachings. Thus, a condition for the activity of faith is that a person brings deliberation to an end. And when one accepts that a decision must be made, one is forced

84 85

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See the ‘Interlude’ between chapters 4 and 5 in PF for an account of this distinction, PF, 72–88. For an extended argument supporting this claim see ‘Does Kierkegaard Think Beliefs Can Be Directly Willed?’, in Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self, 299–309 [304, 307]. For an opposing view, see Louis Pojman, Religious Belief and the Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). See, for example, CUP, 111–16, 335–7 and 342, where Climacus says that the transition from possibility to actuality constitutes a leap. CUP, 429.

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to either accept Christianity in faith or reject it in offence. When the result is acceptance, it feels like a ‘leap’ to the understanding because of the gaps that are crossed between historical evidence about Christianity to the stance of faith, in which one’s relation to God impinges on one’s life. To say that faith involves a decision is not to say that it is simply a human action, one that humans can perform simply through their own efforts. Kierkegaard consistently thinks of Christian faith as a gift, something that is made possible only by the grace of God. In Fragments this is expressed by calling faith ‘the condition’, and claiming that the condition must be received first-hand from the incarnate God. If faith is a gift from God, something that humans cannot achieve simply by an effort of willing, what role is left for human decision? Why do some people respond to God’s revelation with faith and others with offence? One possible answer would be to affirm that it is simply God’s sovereign decree that settles the matter, and human choice plays no role. However, Kierkegaard does not wish to follow that road. His answer, we think, lies in the decision humans must make about accepting their sinfulness. God’s revelation begins with a revelation of sin, something humans could never discover on their own. In Philosophical Fragments, Climacus affirms that when the incarnate God teaches us that we are sinners, the decision to accept our sinfulness represents the one and only analogy between the teaching of the incarnate God and the teaching of a Socrates. For just as Socrates is only the occasion for recollecting that one is in untruth, so too the teaching of the incarnate God is only the occasion for learning that one is a sinner.88 Even if we cannot discover our sinfulness without God revealing it, we do have the power to accept this truth or refuse to accept it. The person who is willing to recognize his or her sinfulness will also be open to the possibility of a revelation that transcends what unaided human reason could discover. Such a person will be open to ‘setting aside’ or ‘surrendering’ the claims of an imperialistic or domineering reason. Thus, Kierkegaard consistently says that the road to Christian faith lies through the consciousness of sin.

CONCLUSION Kierkegaard describes faith as a complex, multiform response to God’s revelation in Christ that has many different aspects: trusting, believing, hoping, surrendering, expecting and obeying, among others. Faith is not merely assent to a proposition but a passion that manifests itself in emotion and action. That does not mean, we have argued, that faith is devoid of intellectual content, for faith includes belief as well. But even those aspects of faith that are intellectual are not merely so; reason is itself something that is passionately active. For Kierkegaard, humans are fundamentally passionate beings, and an encounter with God’s revelation produces passionate responses. Christian faith involves such things as hoping for the kingdom of God, sorrowing over sin and believing that God will be victorious over death. Faith in this sense is indeed a task for a lifetime. It may go against those human ways of thinking that we give the honorific term ‘reasonable’ to, but when the passion of faith is present, faith and the intellect are in a ‘happy relationship’.89

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PF, 14. We would like to acknowledge Jeffrey Hanson for his help in developing the title for this chapter.

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FURTHER READING Barnett, Christopher B. From Despair to Faith: The Spirituality of Søren Kierkegaard. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. Davenport, John. ‘Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling.’ In Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, edited by Edward F. Mooney, 196–233. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Evans, C. Stephen. Faith beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account. Reason and Religion Series. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1998. Evans, C. Stephen. Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays. Provost Series. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006. Westphal, Merold. Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2014.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Christian Life: A Humble Striving Born of Gratitude PHILIP G. ZIEGLER

See now that I, even I, am he; there is no god besides me. I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand. – Deut. 32.39

INTRODUCTION As a modern thinker profoundly committed to the analysis and understanding of human subjectivity generally, and of the distinctive subjectivity of the Christian life in particular, Kierkegaard’s writing on the Christian self and Christian life exemplifies the fact that a theologically adequate anthropology is properly indexed to the vision of salvation at the heart of the Christian faith. I will suggest that Kierkegaard’s intense concentration upon the negative aspects of the experience of the Christian self – suffering, fragility, self-deception, weakness, failure, sin and finally despair – is a function of his no less intense commitment to a radically Pauline soteriology. His treatment of the Christian self in these terms republishes in an anthropological register the form and consequence of the objective (and even cosmic) reality of salvation set forth in the theology of the cross. Seen in this way, the dialectics of death / life and divine judgement / mercy at the heart of Paul’s eschatological Gospel win an interior echo within the life of the Christian. It is for this reason that Kierkegaard contends that it is always profoundly edifying to acknowledge on the one hand that even as we traverse the world it is utterly lost to us, and on the other that throughout the life of faith, ‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’. In this way, the negative form of Christian subjectivity – marked by both awareness of sin and sacrificial dislocation within the world – attests to the divine source of grace and the radicality of its liberating work. It suggests that it is yet possible for Christians to hear, to own and to live from what we might call the vivifying power of the mortifying Gospel of God. Precisely from this follows the grateful and active Christian life of militant discipleship to which so many of Kierkegaard’s latter works give passionate witness. The shape of the whole is captured concisely by Kierkegaard himself in a remark from the journals when he writes, ‘infinite humiliation and grace, and then a striving born of gratitude – this is Christianity.’1 This chapter unfolds in four parts. In the first, ‘Kierkegaard’s Inverse Dialectic’, I consider the contours of his distinctive treatment of Christian subjectivity with the aid of important recent work of Sylvia Walsh and Simon Podmore. In the second, ‘Infinite 1

JP 1:993, p. 434 / SKS 24, NB22:112, p. 164.

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Humiliation and Grace’, I forge connections between this discussion and the most radical features of Paul’s soteriology, focusing on a selection of passages which illustrate the source and logic of Kierkegaard’s own edifying negativity. In the third, ‘Striving Born of Gratitude’, I analyse the way in which Kierkegaard conceives of the new life that emerges from the crucible of saving divine judgement and grace to be one of militant witness and discipleship. A fourth and final section ventures some few concluding remarks on the theme.

I. KIERKEGAARD’S ‘INVERSE DIALECTIC’ OF CHRISTIAN SUBJECTIVITY As early as Either/Or, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author had announced that ‘only man is wrong; to him alone is reserved what is denied to everything else – to be in the wrong in relation to God’.2 The twofold ambition of Kierkegaard’s own explicit ‘second authorship’ is to describe this dynamic of Christian subjectivity ‘with a dialectical acuteness and a primitivity not to be found in any other literature’.3 Crucially, the first of these ambitions is ordered to the second: the value of dialectical exposition lies in its ability to help in displaying the primitive – that is, originary – form of the Christian self. The specific dialectic Kierkegaard deploys is at once ‘qualitative-existential’ and ‘inverse’. It is, first, ‘qualitative-existential’ (rather than logical) in that his account of Christian subjectivity articulates the actual living contradiction between who one now is and who one can and ought to be, or in Kierkegaard’s own idiom, between the actual and the ideal. This dialectical work is relentless and radical: Kierkegaard demands that one be unhesitatingly polemical for the sake of the ideal. Second, it is ‘inverse’ because of the specific nature of the Christian ideal in question, namely righteousness vis-à-vis God. The truth of the religious ideal is displayed precisely by its contradiction of the actual; further, it is this negation of the actual which properly bespeaks the character, intensity and force of the ideal. Because it is concerned with the ideal, religious reflection generally – and specifically Christian reflection to the highest degree – ‘continually uses the negative as the essential form’.4 This qualitative dialectic of Christian existence is always negative or inverted in character because it is precisely our unrighteousness that testifies to the infinite requirement – as well as the infinite mercy – of the righteous God. The truth of the ideal is first suffered in existential contradiction and only then attested by way of such dialectical inversion in thought and speech. Thus, Kierkegaard claims that the ‘essentially Christian [thing] is always the positive that is recognizable by the negative’.5 As Sylvia Walsh’s valuable recent study of Kierkegaard’s account of Christian existence demonstrates so thoroughly, the positive features of the truth of Christian faith – namely ‘faith, forgiveness, new life, love, hope, joy, and consolation’ – are dialectically attested by four decisive negative qualifications of the Christian self: ‘consciousness of sin, the possibility of offense, dying to the world or self-denial, and suffering’.6 It is by lavishing ‘inverted attention’ upon these qualities that genuine Christian reflection upon

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EO2, 344 / SKS 3, 324. JP 5:5914, p. 336 / SKS 20, NB34.a, p. 37, cited by Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 6. CUP, 524. JP 4:4680, p. 407 / SKS 24, NB25:32, p. 458. Walsh, Living Christianly, 13–14.

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the self will always emphasize ‘the requirement in all its infinitude so that [one] rightly learns to be humbled and to rely upon grace’; indeed, he can assert that Christianity simply is ‘infinite humiliation and grace, and then a striving born of gratitude’.7 Crucially for our purposes here, Kierkegaard also observes that ‘the apostle always speaks out of this inverted dialectic’.8 We note well that the apostle does not just speak of or even in terms of this inverted dialectic, but that he speaks out of it. The negative dialectic is itself but a late expression of the truth of the infinite contradiction one has already suffered in relation to the ideal, to the absolute, to God. All Christian subjectivity has this suffering as its primary, indeed apostolic, shape and source. As Kierkegaard explains, this suffering ‘means neither more nor less than the mark, the criterion, of my actually being involved with the absolute and of my relating myself to it’ and is therefore at one and the same time also ‘sheer blessedness and sheer grace’.9 In short, such ‘suffering as the sign of the relationship to God is what Christianity is according to the New Testament’.10 The Christian self is thus a function of both the contradiction of one’s self by God and the subsequent contradiction of the world by that same self now made angular precisely in virtue of its divine contradiction (i.e. by ‘humiliation and grace’). As Simon Podmore has argued on this basis, the priority and permanence of the negative is a function of what it means for human beings to know themselves coram deo, that is, before God: if true self-knowledge involves the ‘absolute expression’ of the absolute – indeed ‘infinite qualitative’ – difference between humanity and God, then to pursue this truth demands that we tarry with the infinite contradiction of humanity by God in both judgement and forgiveness (again Kierkegaard’s ‘humiliation and grace’).11 As Kierkegaard himself says, as sinners human beings are ‘separated from God by a yawning qualitative abyss’ and ‘naturally when God forgives sinners he is again separated from [human beings] by the same qualitative abyss’.12 The logic of this inverse dialectic of the Christian self runs close to that of the primus usus legis in the Lutheran doctrine of law and gospel: Lex semper accusat. Yet, in emphasizing that the self is negated by both divine judgement (humiliation) and mercy (grace), Kierkegaard wants to signal something more.13 The older theological concept of ‘law’ is here conceptually expanded to encompass the infinite demand that befalls human existence coram deo. As he puts it once, ‘in Christianity it is not even the law which orders you to die to the world; it is love which says: Do you not love me, then? And if the answer is: Yes, then it follows as a matter of course that you must die to the world.’14 We might say that by virtue of their origin in God both law and gospel here stand as absolute contradictions of human existence. That a human life should suffer this salutary 7 8 9 10

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JP 1:993, p. 434 / SKS 24, NB22:112, p. 164. JP 4:4680, p. 407 / SKS 24, NB25:32, p. 458, cited by Walsh, Living Christianly, 9. Emphasis added. JP 4:4680, p. 407 / SKS 24, NB25:32, p. 458. JP 4:4682, p. 409 / SKS 25, NB26:23, p. 31. He continues, ‘I am far from this height, but I understand it, and I understand it to my humiliation.’ See Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), xi–xxiv, 1–2. SV2 XI, 261, cited by Paul Sponheim, ‘Kierkegaard’s View of a Christian’, in Kierkegaard’s View of Christianity, ed. Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup. Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Boghandel, 1978), 182–91 [188]. Kierkegaard can be sharply critical of Luther’s own lack of dialectical sensibility at key points, see JP 1:486, p. 192 / SKS 21, NB7:35, p. 93. JP 1:538, p. 219 / SKS 25, NB26:72, p. 76.

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humiliation and grace is attested ‘inversely’ in and by Christian consciousness of sin and dying to the world. This inverse dialectical treatment of the Christian self is manifest and elaborated across the works of Kierkegaard’s second ‘Christian’ authorship. In a longer treatment we would want to canvass specific examples drawn from texts whose very titles suggest the form: ‘The Gospel of Sufferings’, ‘The Joy of It: That the Weaker you Become the Stronger God Becomes in You’ and ‘To Need God is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection’.15 But its essential logic is concisely and programmatically set out in the first chapters of the Philosophical Fragments. There, the singularity, absoluteness and eternal significance of the ‘moment’ of the advent of the Saviour in truth is shown to be integrally related to the acknowledgement that those to whom he comes are in untruth, bereft of the condition of possibility for receiving the truth at all, indeed that their untruth ‘is not merely outside the truth but is polemical against the truth’: sin is a negative position of depravity and enmity.16 Thus divine salvation comes by way of total contradiction, effecting that break – the translation from ‘not to be’ to ‘to be’ – which the New Testament calls death and rebirth. In this, the human owes the Saviour everything: ‘that he becomes nothing and yet is not annihilated; that he owes him everything and yet becomes boldly confident; that he understands the truth, but the truth makes him free; that he grasps the guilt of untruth, and then again bold confidence triumphs in the truth.’17 This Christian truth about the self can be made plain only by way of the dialectics of inversion, the absolute need and humility of the human attesting the absolute deity and graciousness of God. In sum, Kierkegaard’s account of the Christian self bespeaks the mortifying work of the Gospel of God. It turns on an understanding of the pragmatics of divine grace whereby God’s salutary contradiction of the human being in sin deals ‘a fatal blow at all his worldly thinking, aspiring, and pursuing’ and turns ‘everything upside down’.18 To conceive of the self under the sign of this saving contradiction demands an ‘inverse dialectic’ if the positive content of the Gospel is to be set forth in a properly self-involving and edifying manner. For it is only the disrupted, displaced and dislocated human self – humiliated by judgement and evacuated by grace – that attests the ‘moment of ultimate discontent with the world and ultimate contentment with God . . . the moment in which is said “now everything has become new” ’.19

II. ‘INFINITE HUMILIATION AND GRACE’ – MORTIFIED UNTO LIFE AT THE TURNING OF THE AGES For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. – Phil. 1.21 The aspects of Kierkegaard’s account of the Christian self just canvassed suggest that ‘the becoming [of a] Christian is not the mild unfolding of inherent [human] potentiality’ but a passage effected by way of the annihilating and re-creative advent of divine judgement

15 16

17 18 19

See CD and EUD, 297–326. PF, 15. See also Daphne Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 240–1. PF, 30–1. Kierkegaard, ‘To Need God is a Human Being’s Highest Perfection’, in EUD, 300. EUD, 333, citing 2 Cor. 5.17.

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and grace.20 As we noted above, Kierkegaard himself remarks that ‘the apostle always speaks out of this inverted dialectic’.21 So in this section of the chapter we reflect briefly upon some aspects of Pauline soteriology that fund Kierkegaard’s own edifying negativity and apart from which it is unlikely to be properly understood. As Cyril O’Regan has recently remarked, Kierkegaard’s thinking about the self is ‘massively informed . . . by an essentially Pauline vision’.22 The point could be demonstrated with reference to a range of Pauline texts, but for present purposes we will focus on two passages in Galatians where Paul declares, ‘I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Gal. 2.20a), and later, ‘May I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world’ (Gal. 6.14).23 Paul speaks in these verses of the consequences of the ‘apocalypse of Jesus Christ’ (Gal. 1.12c, 16), in which God has acted redemptively upon the world scene to bring a ‘complete and irrevocable end’ to the old and passing age.24 He understands saving divine action to be invasive and decisive: the Gospel comes upon the world so as to overreach everything that has been for the sake the new thing God is doing. As the Corinthian letters also signal, the advent of God’s salvation in Christ ‘destroys the wisdom of the wise’ and ‘thwarts’ all previous discernment (1 Cor. 1.19-20) by ‘choosing what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God’ (1 Cor. 1.28). This course of contradiction is the path of the ‘new creation’ by which ‘everything old has passed away’ (2 Cor. 5.17). The cross is, for Paul, the central act of divine rectification, the axis upon which God is turning the ages and in which Christians are participant. And the ‘extreme language of crucifixion with Christ gives expression to one key element of such participation, [namely] the end or the permanent loss of a previous manner of life’ that comes with rescue ‘from the present evil age’ (Gal. 1.4).25 In his gloss on Gal. 2.20, Luther calls the work of the Gospel the abolition of the old, as the old self is displaced by the Christ whose righteousness now ‘lives in’ one by faith.26 As Beverly Gaventa summarizes the force of the same verse, ‘It is the whole of the έγω that is gone . . . the gospel is singular in that it is all-consuming: there is no more έγω. And the gospel is also all life giving: Christ lives in me.’27

20 21 22

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24 25 26

27

Sponheim, ‘Kierkegaard’s View of a Christian’, 187. JP 4:4680, p. 407 / SKS 24, NB25:32, p. 458, cited by Walsh, Living Christianly, 9. Emphasis added. Cyril O’Regan, ‘The Rule of Chaos and the Perturbation of Love’, in Kierkegaard and Christian Faith, ed. Paul Martens and C. Stephen Evans (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 131–55 [154]. On Kierkegaard’s relation to Paul generally, and the matter of the Christian life in particular, see Lori Unger Brandt, ‘Paul: Herald of Grace and Paradigm of Christian Living’, in Kierkegaard and the Bible. Tome II: The New Testament, ed. Lee C. Barrett and Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 1: tome II (New York: Routledge, 2010), 189–208. The other texts which invite similar reflection would include 1 Cor. 1.28-31, 2 Cor. 1.12, 2 Cor. 5.17, 2 Cor. 11.16–12.10, Rom. 5.2-3, 11, Phil. 1.21, 3.8, etc. See Martinus De Boer, Galatians (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 159, 81–2. De Boer, Galatians, 161. Martin Luther on Gal. 2.20, in Lectures on Galatians, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, vol. 27 (Philadelphia: Concordia Press, 1963), 238. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, ‘The Singularity of the Gospel Revisited’, in Galatians and Christian Theology: Justification, the Gospel, and Ethics in Paul’s Letter, ed. Mark W. Elliott, Scott J. Hafemann, N. T. Wright and John Frederick (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 187–99 [193, 195]. It might be possible to develop an account of the Christian life conceived on the basis of the idea of the ‘dative self ’, that is, from an account of how things come to appear when the human self is consistently understood on the grounds of its being displaced into the dative case by the divine subject and its agency (Christ for us, Christ in me, etc.).

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The point is reinforced when we reflect on the meaning of what Paul says of the double crucifixion of self to world and world to self in Gal. 6.14 (‘the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world’). Many commentators take this subjectively: Calvin, for instance, says that Paul speaks here of a state of mind in which the world is despised and belittled.28 But recent ‘apocalyptic’ readings of the apostle have stressed that the force of this claim is much more far reaching. To speak this way is to suggest that the entire world order, once ‘sacred and dependable’, has been ‘utterly destroyed’. Paul speaks here of ‘what he takes to be an objective situation, the effect of Christ’s death on an objective cross and of his own participation in that objective death’; for Paul, the previous cosmos – the very order of things of which he was an integral part – has itself been brought to an end on the cross of Christ and has ‘suffered the loss of that world’.29 This reading is supported by the radical announcement of ‘new creation’ (Gal. 6.15) as the most apt characterization of what has come about, come upon and supplanted the passing age. J. Louis Martyn reads the passage similarly, contending that Paul speaks here of the crucifixion as a ‘watershed event’ in which Paul has become a stranger to his previous companions ‘and indeed to all people who live in the world’ of the old cosmic order, ‘as their world became a stranger to him’.30 The total contradiction and loss of the old world, and the radically disorienting birth of a new world – this is the context which demands a radically new and dialectical analysis of Christian subjectivity in which the positive is known and attested by the negative. For it is in the mortification of the world at the advent of the new that the self discovers that it too is being mortified unto new life. As Paul says of his own personal situation, ‘I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as utter rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ’ (Phil. 3.8). In sum, the human person and world stand related as microcosm to macrocosm, but more than this: faith’s ‘dying to the world’ has as its condition of possibility and comprehensive ground the ‘crucifixion’ of the world that is the advent of the new creation. Informed by contemporary Pietist readings of Paul that emphasized the radical transformation of life in and by Christ in the apostle’s witness, Kierkegaard himself discerns and lays particular stress upon these very same themes.31 Indeed, it is a matter of record that, as Kierkegaard observes, the Apostle Paul himself combined emphatic proclamation of Christ’s atoning death with an apostolic life of costly imitation, thereby enacting this very point in his own person.32 For this reason, the militant freedom and radical self-renunciation of faith are but marks of that new humanity which – as Paul himself knew all too well – ‘bears the death of Jesus in the body’ (2 Cor. 4.10) in the time that remains. The unconditioned ideality of Kierkegaard’s inverse dialectic of the Christian self bespeaks Paul’s all-consuming Gospel of militant grace; it is simply a qualitative / existential implicate of the crucifixion of the Lord.

28

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31 32

On Gal. 6.14-15, John Calvin, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians, trans. T. H. L. Parker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 117. De Boer, Galatians, 401–2. J. Louis Martyn, Galatians (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 564. Cf. Luther, Lectures on Galatians, 404–5, where he remarks that ‘the world, not Christ, lives in men’, though now Christ, and not the world, lives in Paul: hence, crucifixion. On this see Brandt, ‘Paul: Herald of Grace and Paradigm of Christian Living’, 192–4. JP 2:1877, p. 333 / SKS 23, NB20:148, p. 470.

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III. ‘STRIVING BORN OF GRATITUDE’ – CHRISTIAN LIFE AS MILITANT DISCIPLESHIP In his epigraph to ‘Christian Addresses’ he entitled ‘Thoughts That Wound from Behind – For Upbuilding’, Kierkegaard writes, ‘The essentially Christian needs no defense, is not served by any defense – it is the attacker . . . Christianity is the attacker – in Christendom, of course, it attacks from behind.’33 Being a creature of the crucifixion of the Lord fashioned by ‘humiliation and grace’, the Christian life is enacted under the lordship of the Crucified in the form of a ‘striving born of gratitude’. We should understand his account of the Christian life as the outworking of that ‘second ethics’ of which the pseudonym ‘Haufniensis’ writes in The Concept of Anxiety. In that text we read of a new ethics that ‘presupposes dogmatics’, that is, which takes as its ground the dogmatic description of the actuality of human sinfulness and the work of divine grace upon the truth of which all other ethics are simply ‘shipwrecked’.34 Kierkegaard insists that the total evangelical disruption of the old world and self must be acknowledged as the source and impetus of the new or ‘second’ life which the Christian must now live. The watchwords of this account are provided by Mt. 6.24 and Jas 1.22: ‘No one can serve two masters’ and ‘Be doers of the Word, and not only hearers of it.’35 ‘Following the master’ exclusively and ‘doing the Word’ obediently specify the nature of the ‘striving’ envisaged. Here the inverse dialectic of Christian existence continues to hold: for the Christian life is manifest only in and through suffering permanent antinomy with the world as it is set ‘in opposition to the immediate and universal forms of existence’.36 Rooted in the New Testament witness as previously discussed, Kierkegaard understands the Christian of ‘the present age’ to be situated even more fundamentally in the contested overlap of the old and new ages. In this eschatological location, ‘the world is going neither forward nor backward’ but rather is ‘the element that can provide the test of being a Christian, who in this world is always a member of the church militant’.37 In this way individual Christian lives reiterate the macrocosmic confrontation of the new and old worlds. The existence which takes shape in faith’s grateful struggle to serve Christ and obey the Word is permanently repentant, heeding the summons that, as Martin Luther put it, ‘you all must become different and do otherwise’ in response to the commanding gift of grace.38 It entails venturing in reliance upon God a life of ‘unalloyed divine service’ whose ‘hymn of praise is in the obedience’, a life at once joyful, ascetical, agonistic – indeed militant – and marked by suffering.39 In this, Kierkegaard corrects wrong-headed understandings of the Protestant conception that the Christian life is lived sola fide: Louis Dupré astutely observed that this ‘reintegration of Christian asceticism in the sola fide

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36 37 38

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CD, 162. ‘Sin, then, belongs to ethics only insofar as upon this concept it is shipwrecked with the aid of repentance.’ CA, 17, cf. 18–24. JFY, 145–215, FSE, 13–51. On the importance of the latter in Kierkegaard’s work see Richard Bauckham, ‘Kierkegaard and the Epistle of James’, in Kierkegaard and Christian Faith, ed. Paul Martens and C. Stephen Evans (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 39–54. Walsh, Living Christianly, 150. PC, 232. Martin Luther, ‘Smalcald Articles’, 3.3, in the Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (St. Louis: Concordia, 1921), 481. CD, 84, 86. The idea of the Christian life as ‘venturing in reliance upon God’ comes from JFY, 100 and 102.

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doctrine of the Reformation’ is one of Kierkegaard’s most important contributions to theology.40 The Christian life is militant and essentially so; it simply is ‘militant piety’.41 In the first place, the militancy of the Christian life is a function of the fact that it is lived out where a ‘kingdom not of this world’ has erupted into a world marked by ‘mutinous untruth’, not least concerning Christianity and the true shape of the life of faith.42 In this context, all forms of Christian existence that ‘witness to the truth’ cut across the settled conventions of its environment – including those of Christendom – in disruptive ways.43 This is what occasions the offence of which Kierkegaard speaks so often in the later works. The Christian appears in this world as an alarmingly unnatural creature whose existence calls into question natural life because his ‘love of God is hatred of the world’.44 As Kierkegaard explains, ‘Christianity, and being a true Christian must to the highest degree be an offense to the natural man, that he must regard Christianity as the greatest treason and the true Christian as the meanest traitor to being a human being.’45 One of the fundamental reasons this is so is because the Christian life is ‘drawn to Christ in lowliness’, and in tracing this downward or kenotic movement insists upon the ideality of humble striving in a world of achievement.46 So, ‘militant’ in Kierkegaard’s account of the Christian life designates the dynamic and offensive form it adopts in its collision with the world as a result of faith’s tenacious positive commitment to the ideal and unconditional character of the Christian claim. As Kierkegaard said of his own witness, ‘it is not polemical against any particular person, is not finitely polemical against anything finite but is infinitely polemical only in order to throw light on the ideal’ because ‘the true Christian perspective for every Christian qualification is polemical within or away from finitude toward the eternal’.47 This is key: Christian militancy is indexed to truth, being a function of it and tethered to its service. Kierkegaard can assert that ‘only the church militant is truth’, only because it is divine truth which enjoins faith’s militancy.48 The advent of the truth wrestles its human witnesses free from their ignorant complicity in the untruth of the world – including that of Christendom – and thereby sets them permanently at odds with it. ‘There may be quite a number of true Christians in Christendom’, Kierkegaard remarks, ‘but every such one is also militant.’49 The Christian life offends precisely as it attests the truth of the unconditional grace and claim that creates and sustains it. But this way of putting the matter is too abstract.

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46 47 48 49

Louis Dupré, Kierkegaard as Theologian (London: Sheed & Ward, 1964), xi. On the tension with traditional Lutheran accounts of sola fide, see Brandt, ‘Paul: Herald of Grace and Paradigm of Christian Living’, 203. George Pattison, less positively, speaks of the ‘sombre shadow of a world-denying form of religiosity’ which ‘constantly grows in intensity and depth as the authorship continues’, Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith (London: SPCK, 1997), 114–15. AN, 130. FSE, 19; PC, 211. True ‘Christianity is a militant teaching, is a polemic, that it posits eternal enmity between God and the world’. JP 1:499, p. 200 / SKS 22, NB11:100, p. 56. JFY, 193, where the phrase is applied to Luther. Elsewhere he stresses that it is precisely in confessing Christianity in the world that the church is militant. PC, 217, cf. 212. PC, 224. JFY, 140. ‘All human wisdom consists in this glorious and golden principle: to a certain degree, there is a limit, or in this “both-and”, “also”; the unconditional is madness.’ JFY, 154. PC, 209. AN, 133, 130. PC, 219. CD, 229.

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Better and more concretely, Christian life offends to the extent that it actually follows after the one who is ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’ (Jn 14.6). The truth from which the militancy of faith derives is not a proposition but a life. In a key passage Kierkegaard elaborates the import of this claim: Thus Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only true explanation of what truth is . . . the being of truth is the redoubling of truth within yourself, within me, within him, that your life, my life, his life expresses the truth approximately in the striving for it, that your life, my life, his life is approximately the being of the truth in the striving for it just as the truth was in Christ a life, for he was the truth.50 For this reason, a Christian offers her militant testimony only in the form of a life of faithful striving to imitate Christ who himself became ‘unconditionally heterogeneous with everyone’ and yet remained in the world for their sake ‘in order to suffer’.51 The true Christian is Christ’s imitator, not his admirer.52 Kierkegaard envisages such imitation as a non-identical repetition of the movement and shape of Christ’s own existence which is the prototype of all Christian lives.53 It is ‘non-identical’ because Christ is ‘also much more than the prototype’ for he is at the same time the redeemer and the ‘object of faith’.54 The prototypical work of Christ in his self-abasement and lowliness is to propel and to beckon and to leave traces – ‘footprints’ Kierkegaard calls them at one point – to direct those who would follow after him as imitators.55 He at once announces and enacts the unconditional divine requirement even as he himself fulfils it for us.56 But this for us includes his unconditional summons to follow him. So the concept of ‘imitation’ is best filled out with the concept of discipleship (Efterfølgelsen) with which it keeps close company in Kierkegaard’s late works. Along with his radical self-abasement, Kierkegaard stresses Christ’s prototypical heterogeneity and eschatological freedom vis-à-vis the world. Of this he writes that ‘just like a straight line that touches the circle at only one point, so was he in the world and yet outside the world, serving only one master’.57 Christ’s life and way is the life and way of one who is out of phase with and angular to the old world precisely because he inhabits and acts from the new before us and ‘for us’. Drawn into this same heterogeneity and freedom by grace, the essentially Christian form of life comes to share in Christ’s own abasement. In collision with the world, Christian difference or alterity is manifest in persistent self-denial and suffering.58 The struggle to serve one master, to do the Word – this militant discipleship – is ‘born of gratitude’.59 Arising from thankfulness, Christian striving after the prototype is also 50 51 52

53

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55 56 57 58 59

PC, 205. JFY, 168. Cf. PC, 219. PC, 254, JFY, 198–9: ‘Christ wants admirers no more now than he did then, to say nothing of drivellers; he wants only disciples.’ The idea of Christ as ‘prototype’ is developed at several points, including in PC, 238–43, and most extensively in JFY, 147–213. AN, 131. In PC, 238, he writes, ‘Christ came to the world with the purpose of saving the world, also with the purpose – this in turn is implicit in his first purpose – of being the prototype.’ Cf. JFY, 159, and JP 2:1862, p. 235 / SKS 23, NB15:32, p. 27. PC, 238. JFY, 159. JFY, 167. WL, 56. ‘Imitation or discipleship does not come first, but “grace”; then imitation follows as a fruit of gratitude.’ JP 2:1886, p. 338 / SKS 24, NB22:52, p. 132.

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the authentic expression of gratitude to God for the difficult gift of salvation: ‘Christ’, he writes, ‘has desired only one kind of gratitude: from the individual, and as practically as possible in the form of imitation.’60 To be drawn actively to follow after the prototype is not to suffer ‘the law’s demand that a poor wretch of a man must torture himself ’61 with impossible burdens; rather, it is the living worship of the redeemed: So also with the believer in relation to God – expressing his gratitude in words, perhaps even in more elegant and artistically chosen words (and this is an utterly wrong direction), he will finally reach a point where he must say: I cannot stand it, this no longer satisfies my need; you must, O God, permit me a far stronger expression for my gratitude – works.62 Such works are works of self-giving love. And precisely as such they are also so many occasions for and forms of suffering, an inalienable aspect of the Christian’s militant collision with the environing world for the sake of the truth. Indeed, Kierkegaard can summarize the true ambition of love’s striving in just these terms when he writes, ‘your only desire must be to suffer for the truth in order to express some gratitude for what Christ is for you. This, you see, is Christianity.’63 Once again, the ‘inverse dialectic’ provides the fundamental grammar of Kierkegaard’s theology of the Christian life: here, joy is found in the suffering that bespeaks the truth of a disciple’s grateful life of service. Indeed, such suffering itself provides renewed occasions for gratitude to God, as Kierkegaard explains: ‘And when everything seems to storm in upon us, when everything totters, when all depends on bending without breaking, he who from a full heart can say: All God’s gifts are good when they are received with gratitude – in this gratitude and by this gratitude he has overcome the world.’64 The gratitude that strives in discipleship against the world subjectively reduplicates the objectivity of the divine striving in the abasement of the cross that has already turned the ages.

CONCLUDING REMARKS: A FULLY SOTERIOLOGICAL ACCOUNT OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE Allow me to venture four remarks by way of conclusion. The first is simply to observe that, as I hope I have signalled, Kierkegaard’s inverse dialectic of Christian existence should be understood as a reiteration within the discourse of human subjectivity of Pauline soteriology with its radical account of salvation by an absolute, gracious divine contradiction of the world in Christ for the sake of the world. Christian subjectivity rightly represents an interior echo of the cosmic revolution wrought by the apocalypse of the Gospel of God. Both the deity of God and the graciousness of grace, we might say, provide the fundamental logic of salvation and so also of the saved self which finds itself brought to naught in order to be made alive and, being made anew, knows itself to be dislocated, wrenched out of phase with the ‘form of this world [which] is passing away’ (1 Cor. 7.31). The kind

60 61 62 63 64

JP 2:1518, p. 190 / SKS 25, NB30:7, p. 387. JP 2:1892, p. 340 / SKS 24, NB22:144, p. 177. JP 4:4524, p. 335 / SKS 25, NB26:86, p. 87. JP 4:4867, p. 495 / SKS 23, NB17:61, p. 205. JP 2:1507, pp. 186–7 / SKS 19, Notebook 7:55, p. 219. On the importance of this theme see David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 139–40, and especially 153–85.

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of self and subjectivity at issue in the Gospel seems to be one in which the self is always utterly dependent upon the gift of divine-saving truth, a truth which, because it is divine, ‘kills to make alive’ and which can never be digested or possessed by the actual but which always cuts across it in the invasion of the ideal upon the actual. Kierkegaard offers a fully soteriological account of the Christian life as a ‘micro-cosmic apocalyptic’.65 Second, and more to the matter of the discourse of theology itself: one might entertain the awkward thought that on such grounds there is little that is really Christianly interesting about the human self and subjectivity as such. Such interest as there is in theological anthropology more generally is a consequence of a real, pressing and abiding interest in the saving reality of God and its effects, and so is always a function of soteriology. Soteriology must increase; anthropology as such must decrease, we might say.66 Cyril O’Regan has observed that Kierkegaard’s thinking about the human moves on the basis of a ‘Reformation axiom’ that theology, and not philosophy, has ‘the necessary vocabulary to deal with radical change’, in particular that most radical of changes involved in the drastic ‘perturbation’ of the self in its encounter with ‘God as given definitively in Christ’. The heart of his concern is, O’Regan contends, the inauguration of a ‘new and a redeemed stream of temporality, a new order of self-relation’ which ‘forever bears the mark of a wound for which no pre-eschatological cure can be provided’.67 Perhaps Kierkegaard’s example invites the thought that serious Christian thinking about human life in the world remade by the Gospel can and must be fully soteriological without remainder. Third, if, as Kierkegaard holds, Christianity is nothing if not a ‘radical cure’ that ‘transforms everything fundamental in a person’, then Christian talk of the self is fundamentally and inescapably soteriological in both content and aim as has just been suggested.68 But more than this, the edifying character of such discourse also becomes a key stake here.69 Kierkegaard’s practice suggests that the discourse of the Christian self is always confessional, always a provocation and invitation, and so always at least indirectly kerygmatic. In calling to mind the fundamental difference it makes to think of the human coram deo it calls to mind truths about human subjectivity in which subjectivity itself (including one’s own) is at stake; this discourse can never just speak about subjectivity; it must always also speak to it, seeking acknowledgement and assent. It is, in short, an ‘existence communication’, never properly second-order discourse but always also firstorder discourse of witness and devotion inviting, permitting and demanding its ‘reduplication’ in life, in short, an effectual call to discipleship. Fourth and finally, Christian theology has long been anxious about any tendency to reduce theological anthropology to a doctrine of sin, denouncing such a prospect in the service of the philanthropy of theology and, more broadly, the humanity of Christianity. 65

66 67 68

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The phrase ‘micro-cosmic apocalyptic’ itself is from Ken Sundet Jones, ‘The Apocalyptic Luther ’, Word and World 25, no. 3 (2005): 308–16 [312], where it is used of Luther’s own soteriology. Cf. Jn 3.29-30. EUD, 275–6. Cyril O’Regan, ‘The Rule of Chaos and the Perturbation of Love’, 144, 136. See Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, ‘Kierkegaard as an Edifying Christian Author’, in Kierkegaard’s View of Christianity, ed. Thulstrup and Thulstrup, 179–82 [181]. Kierkegaard wrote in 1835, ‘Christianity is a radical cure’ (emphasis in original). KJN 1, p. 29 / SKS 17, AA:18, p. 35. That same year he writes on a scrap of paper, ‘Christianity or becoming a Christian is like any radical cure: one puts it off as long as possible.’ KJN 1, p. 335 / SKS 27, Papir 35, p. 86 / SKP I A 89. On the theme of ‘edification’ more generally, see Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, ‘Kierkegaard as an Edifying Christian Author’; and Paul Müller, ‘Der Begriff “das Erbauliche” bei Sören Kierkegaard’, Kerygma und Dogma 31, no. 2 (1985): 116–34; as well as George Pattison, ‘A Dialogical Approach to Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses’, Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 3, no. 2 (1996): 185–202.

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But perhaps Kierkegaard’s inverse dialectics of the Christian self – understood as I have argued here as a subjective reiteration of Paul’s apocalyptic Gospel – might tempt us to reconsider this anxiety somewhat. Could admission of our ‘being in untruth’ be the only properly edifying anthropological fact that really matters in light of salvation? Acknowledging the fate of the self fully at the mercy of divine judgement and grace, could we perhaps discover the joy of losing a world that is, in fact, well lost? And might we espy a depth of freedom and love in a life whose angularity to the world itself suffers, honours and so attests the fundamental and salutary angularity of that new creation in which, as Paul has it, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything (Gal. 6.15)? Could we come to hear, to know and thus to live fully and freely from the liberating fact ‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’ and so strive militantly in gratitude to ‘imitate’ Christ in this world made strange? Perhaps. But only if, with Kierkegaard, we were to be newly convinced that, as he put it, that in relation to God you are always in the wrong, is not a truth you must acknowledge, not a consolation that alleviates your pain, not a compensation for something better, but it is a joy in which you win a victory over yourself and over the world, your delight, your song of praise, your adoration, a demonstration that your love is happy, as only that love can be with which one loves God.70 For, as the Dane put it concisely on another occasion, ‘To need God is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself.’71

FURTHER READING Martens, Paul, and C. Stephen Evans, eds. Kierkegaard and Christian Faith. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016. Podmore, Simon D. Kierkegaard and the Self before God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Simpson, Christopher Ben. The Truth is the Way: Kierkegaard’s ‘Theologia Viatorum’. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011. Walsh, Sylvia. Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.

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EO2, 351. EUD, 303.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Love: A Holy Caprice AMY LAURA HALL

PRELIMINARY REMARKS Kierkegaard was adept in describing how people become befuddled, or worse, regarding Christian love. My own reading of Kierkegaard and love is related to life at a major research university. I turn to his words as a correction to the quantification of everything. I write from a region determined to be measurably on the go. I am asked each year to register a number, on a computer, evaluating a student’s spirituality. I draw on Kierkegaard’s words on love to name the absurdity. Kierkegaard knew how we may take as common sense a world of meaning that stifles or precludes love. Johannes de Silentio’s confused praise of heraldry in Fear and Trembling reminds readers that love is not a chivalric practice to be mastered but a gift to be received. Two key words in Fear and Trembling (besides ‘Abraham’) are ‘knight’ and ‘courage’. Yet, Silentio truly glimpses love when reading about the reception of a gift of love in the story of Sarah and Tobias.1 In Repetition, Constantin Constantius’s determination to orchestrate joy would be comical, except this leads a young man to despair of loving and being beloved. The pseudonymous author of Repetition seeks repetition like a surveyor, watching other human beings not as their neighbour but as a voyeur. Constantius and the young man of Repetition are alike in their desire to be in control, at a distance, first seeking to find something worth loving, then removing themselves from the effort. They are remote; the story is fruitless. I read Repetition as a tragedy. This is to name only two of Kierkegaard’s many pseudonymous puzzles left for our disorientation and edification. Kierkegaard saw that each one of us is a holy caprice, brought into being out of nothing and renewed daily with bread we do not earn and that we cannot measure. Kierkegaard saw that grace is manna, a nonsense that only makes some sort of sense as we realize how beloved we are. I am like Tobit’s Sarah, daily receiving God’s profligate grace. I read Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings on ethics through Works of Love. There are other scholars writing on Kierkegaard and ethics that draw also, or even primarily, on Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Kierkegaard created characters as if in a play and wrote books in their voice, inhabiting their worldview. Concluding Unscientific Postscript is written by a pseudonym that some read as congenial to a form of progressive Christianity. Two of Kierkegaard’s other pseudonymous tomes, Either/Or and Stages 1

On this, see in particular Louise Carroll Keeley, ‘The Parables of Problem III in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1993), 127–54.

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on Life’s Way, suggest stages along a continuum toward maturity in understanding and performing ethics. In two decades of teaching Works of Love to students who have previously read his writing in an undergraduate class, I have found that many were trained (or at least not discouraged) to find footholds for their spiritual growth from ‘A to B to C’ – or from the aesthetic, to the ethical, to the religious stage. Many of them draw on Johannes Climacus’s Postscript to understand Kierkegaard’s other clues, to solve the puzzle of his authorship. Young Christian readers seem to want to find a coded treasure map to navigate Kierkegaard’s books. His writings are best read as parables, with puzzles remaining. His texts are invitations to see confusion and receive gifts offered by God in Jesus Christ.

INTRODUCTION Works of Love is written under Kierkegaard’s own name. This does not mean the book solves every puzzle or leads to a treasure. In his commentary on the preface to the book, Kierkegaard embodies a character that explains how I am not to read Works of Love: He writes about an emperor who leaves home to record his deeds and brings with him ‘a large number of writers’ to document his works. Kierkegaard comments, ‘This might have succeeded if all of his many and great works had amounted to anything . . . But love is devoutly oblivious of its works.’2 Kierkegaard evokes a new, precarious (i.e. prayerful) life. Works of Love is not a map towards love but an evocation of an alternative stance, a particular relation. This relation is a relation to God in grace: ‘When we speak this way, we are speaking of the love that sustains all existence, of God’s love. If for one moment, one single moment, it were to be absent, everything would be confused.’3 God’s love ‘sustains all existence’ and is the precondition and repeated, sustaining condition that allows any of our words about love to approximate human speech about love. In Paul Holmer’s introduction to Kierkegaard’s writing, he uses a helpful phrase to describe the setting into which Kierkegaard makes a literary intervention: ‘the moving stair that human history is supposed to be’.4 Kierkegaard creates a world different than one most of his contemporaries assumed. Kierkegaard sought to reorient his readers to a different way of seeing themselves, God, and everything that is. The task in Kierkegaard’s era was for a person to use a particular kind of reckoning, a kind of reckoning that writers had made synonymous with ‘reason’. Any other kind of reckoning seemed unreasonable, irrational. So the way to orient oneself, or to ‘place’ oneself, is to reckon in a very specific manner. And, the sort of reckoning that is labelled as rationality itself is related to a ‘moving stair’. The image Holmer uses here reminds me of an upward escalator. That ‘moving stair’ is moving through ‘human history’, indicating that orientation requires something called ‘history’, and that history is moving upward. So a person is to use a manner of thinking to orient herself on the escalator of human history – as that history is ‘supposed to be’. Holmer’s use of ‘suppose’ is useful. It can mean both assumed to be and also purposefully, even providentially, designated to be. 2 3 4

WL, 427, Supplement. WL, 301. Paul L. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, ed. David J. Gouwens and Lee C. Barrett III (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 26.

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Later, Holmer explains this mode and purpose of a reasonable life was not simply an academic matter. This assumption was everywhere, far beyond the hallways of academies where people were expected to learn proper German. This section of Holmer’s writing bears repeating: When one sketches in the details about the theology of that day, the homogeneity becomes almost overpowering. For theologians could scarcely resist making Christianity into something exquisitely metaphysical, especially when historical studies and dispositions well fed on the natural sciences were beginning to make light of miracles, of divine causes and providential orderings. Besides, the reign of philosophy extended so far as to provide the frame of concepts within which empirical science was done, in addition to being understood and subsequently taught. Most of the cultural energies seemed to be not only documented but also forecast by a philosophical scheme. General as it was and tolerant of all kinds of opposition, that philosophy became the climate of opinion within which programs were projected, political policies evaluated, education measured and perpetrated. Even religion was so prefigured.5 Holmer describes a world of meaning-making, where a particular mode of philosophy defines what counts as scientific inquiry, and scientific inquiry underscores the legitimacy of a particular kind of philosophy. This, in turn, helps shape what counts as ‘legitimate’ in politics, learning, even religiosity. These policies, forms of education and validated ways of being religious then could project, legislate and educate to reinforce the ‘theology of the day’ and the questions that counted as proper to ‘the natural sciences’. The task of any one person, if there even is a task for any one person, is to fit oneself within the machinery of meaning-making. Holmer puts this succinctly: ‘To fathom the regularities of the world plan and know one’s place in it seemed the only philosophical and “objective” thing to do.’6 Holmer notes Kierkegaard’s writings are ‘indigenous’.7 Kierkegaard studied in German and returned home to write in Danish. He wrote a form of vernacular theology, not in the sense that he wrote simply but that he wrote for his neighbours in their spoken language, drawing from parables particular to Denmark. I do not find his choice incidental. Writing about Kierkegaard’s writings on love requires me to risk saying a timely, not a timeless, word – connecting his own intervention to an intervention helpful to readers in my own lifetime. I continue to teach Kierkegaard’s Works of Love because I believe the setting Holmer describes continues. The unspooling of what I will call ‘Hegelianism’, through Marxism, social Darwinism and multiple other compatible descriptions of the ‘moving stair of human history’ continues in dominant Western culture and, inasmuch as dominant Western culture continues to define everything that marks an upward trend of ‘progress’ and ‘development’, also in non-Western areas seeking the legitimacy of dominant Western culture. There is still very much of an incentive, as Holmer describes Kierkegaard’s time, to ‘fathom the regularities of the world plan and know one’s place in it’. ‘God’ can become the liquidator, to make a person see herself as a serviceable tool for the ideology and economic machinery of a region, a family, a nation or any other human institution. Into this, I repeat that to speak with any truth about love necessitates a recurring miracle of God’s loving presence. If we are to speak (or write) of love, then we must speak 5 6 7

Ibid., 38. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 8.

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‘of the love that sustains all existence, of God’s love’. It is only with the repeated presence of this love that I am able to speak at all. If God’s love ‘were to be absent’, Kierkegaard writes, ‘everything would be confused’.8 This recurring miracle of ‘the love that sustains all existence’ has a different shape than a ‘moving stair of history’. This recurring miracle of God’s presence may reorient an individual, her mode of orienting herself, and her perspective on her present and her future. Works of Love is Kierkegaard’s gift to readers who find themselves defined by the machinery of their age, unsure where to turn for help. In the first section, I will begin to elicit this giftedness of Works of Love by describing some of Kierkegaard’s helpful turns in the book. Then in the second section, ‘All of World History’, using several examples from my own context, I will suggest why readers continue to need his pastoral work. I use Kierkegaard’s play on words in the pseudonym and text of Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Philosophical Fragments to draw attention to efforts to map human beings in contemporary, popular, moral philosophy in North America. Kierkegaard wrote Works of Love with his own name affixed. He wrote in the voice of other characters in a way that is useful to show what I called (in my book on Kierkegaard) ‘the treachery of love’.9 These Kierkegaardian characters twist love around to dissolve a person into a beautifully useful nothing. In the third section, ‘Love and Conscience’, I begin with a playful and instructive footnote about knowledge, by Kierkegaard, from Philosophical Fragments. I then describe how characters from Either/ Or and Stages on Life’s Way embody how love goes awry. Reading Kierkegaard alongside Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth is helpful to note this contrast between God’s loving presence and a world where everything is ‘confused’. So, in an interlude, I link Wharton’s heroine to Kierkegaard’s insights. Then, in the final, fourth section, ‘Belief ’, I return to Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, a text that illumines the grace presumed in Works of Love. Through Johannes Climacus’s Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard sketches a way of perceiving a life in time such that (a) the past is not necessary, (b) Jesus Christ was not necessary, (c) Jesus Christ is gratuitous and (d) Christians who wish to follow Christ may receive him first-hand, in the non-necessary, gracious gift of his presence at Holy Communion. This, like other of his writings, is parabolic – more akin to a fairy tale than a physics proof. The invitation remains.

I. WORKS OF LOVE These words come in the ‘Conclusion’ to Works of Love, and they are Kierkegaard’s gloss on 1 Jn 4.7, ‘Beloved, let us love one another’: ‘The commandment is that you shall love, but ah, if you will understand yourself and life, then it seems that it should not need to be commanded, because to love people is the only thing worth living for, and without this love, you are not really living.’10 Kierkegaard takes the scriptural command to love our neighbour so seriously that he spends four hundred pages to highlight that command. He uses the command to love our neighbour as the necessary disorientation to expose what Holmer calls the ‘moving stair that human history is supposed to be’. Works of Love is a book that, when read slowly, can help a reader to see where she has been placed, even where she has placed herself. Works of Love can help a reader to see that the task to which she has been put, or has put herself, is itself confused. When ‘[t]o fathom the

8 9 10

WL, 301. Amy Laura Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). WL, 375.

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regularities of the world plan and know one’s place in it seem[s] the only philosophical and “objective” thing to do’ (repeating Holmer here) the command to love my neighbour as myself may intervene. Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is a sustained, scriptural intervention. He seeks to show that the system of knowing of his own time was fundamentally confused, even though it purported to be the definition of clarity. The way Kierkegaard recommends you discover yourself as confused is through prayer, which is how he opens the book. More specifically, it is through a gift from ‘you God of love, source of all love in heaven and on earth’.11 The book is not didactic. The subtitle to Works of Love is ‘Some Christian Deliberations in the Form of Discourses’. In this subtitle, Kierkegaard distinguishes Works of Love from a more straightforward lesson about love. As he explains in a note, a ‘Christian discourse’ ‘presupposes that people know essentially what love is and seeks to win them to it’.12 A deliberation ‘must not so much move, mollify, reassure, persuade as awaken and provoke people and sharpen thought’ seeking first to ‘fetch [the readers] up out of the cellar, call to them, turn their comfortable way of thinking topsy-turvy’.13 A disorientation is necessary to show someone that the system they are supposedly well-placed within is confused. If people are expecting a map to love, or a list to check off on their way up the ladder of holiness, they will gain nothing. The preface to each of the two series in Works of Love that make up the book explains that love occurs within a relation of inexhaustibility: the love Kierkegaard wishes to evoke is ‘essentially inexhaustible’ and ‘in its smallest work essentially indescribable just because essentially it is totally present everywhere and essentially cannot be described’.14 Grace is the inexhaustible and indescribable setting for love. In my book-length treatment of Kierkegaard, I go into detail about how Works of Love works literarily on a reader. Kierkegaard layers facet on facet of real love and false love, especially in the first of the two series, to disorient a reader, so that she recognizes that she has been confused by the assumptions of her day about everything from who to love, to how to love, to who she is and who God is. Kierkegaard makes the task of love so strenuous that it seems, well . . . almost inhuman. This is his homiletic aim. In a reading of Mt. 21.28-31, Kierkegaard explains that the son who eagerly promises but does not recognize the import of his promise is ‘facing the direction of the good’ but ‘is moving backward further away from it’, due to his continual inattention to the import of his promise.15 ‘The yes of the promise is sleep-inducing, but the no, spoken and therefore audible to oneself, is awakening, and repentance is usually not far away.’16 Kierkegaard seeks to wake up readers in a way that I liken to what has come to be known in classical Lutheranism as the convicting, or theological, use of the law.17 That is, the duty to love each neighbour, including those closest to me, as an individual uniquely and singularly beloved by God, is to strike me as insurmountably difficult, moving me into a context where I receive the inexhaustible, essentially immeasurable context of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. The law’s command to love my neighbour is both in time and timeless. The

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

WL, 3. WL, 469, Supplement. WL, 470, Supplement. WL, 3, emphasis in the original. WL, 94. WL, 93. See The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, trans. Charles P. Arand et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), Formula of Concord, especially Article VI.

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law’s command to love does not have a pause button. Rather, the command to love may transform a person to discover ‘the eternal’ in a new way: But when a person in the infinite transformation discovers the eternal itself so close to life that there is not the distance of one single claim, of one single evasion, of one single excuse, of one single moment of time from what he in this instant, in this second, in this holy moment shall do – then he is on the way to becoming a Christian.18 And the ‘way to becoming a Christian’ is not about perfection. It is a reception, at each moment when I find myself baffled, of the presence of God’s love. (For if God’s love is absent, everything is confused.) The next chapter after that quote is ‘Love Is the Fulfilling of the Law’. There he is explicit: ‘What the Law was not capable of accomplishing, as little as it could save a person – that Christ was.’ He continues, ‘Yes, he was Love, and his love was the fulfilling of the Law.’19 Kierkegaard reminds readers that, in extravagant non-necessity, God ‘has created you from nothing’.20 You and I do not exist out of necessity. We come to be out of God’s gift. Jesus Christ has brought me into a setting of infinite gift and therefore immeasurable debt. Kierkegaard asks the reader to see how God has pulled each and every life into God’s grace, as if we are under ‘divine confiscation’. (I am borrowing this phrase from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.)21 This means that each individual is immeasurably God’s own. If Kierkegaard’s use of ‘love’s shall’ is similar to a Lutheran account of the theological, or convicting use of the law, his use of God as the ‘middle term’ is akin to a Lutheran account of the first, or restraining, use of the law.22 Kierkegaard layers uses of the law so one is not subsequent to the other. The ‘shall’ of the command to love my neighbour creates the graced context in which I may begin to see that I have a neighbour to love. I will name this Kierkegaard’s creative use of the law. God becomes the ‘middle term’ between myself and another person, in such a way that God has created the possibility that there is a neighbour in front of me.23 As I read Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, grace and law are not diametrically opposed. They are intertwined. The way Kierkegaard defines the term ‘neighbour’, a neighbour is a human being recognized by another as God’s own.24 Seeing a creature in front of me through the prism of grace, with God as the ‘middle term’, I see that the creature in front of me is not an extension of my will, a tool for anyone else’s project, or a divinity who can command my obedience or my allegiance. To ‘go with God’, as Kierkegaard repeats a blessing common at his time, reminds us that ‘it is indeed only in this company that one discovers the neighbor, because God is the middle term’.25 Without God as this ‘middle term’, everything becomes ‘confused’. While Kierkegaard is often read in disagreement with Immanuel Kant, in this case he has taken Kant’s insistence that no human being is a mere means to someone else’s project

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

WL, 90. WL, 99. WL, 102. FT, 77. The full quote is as follows: ‘Nor could Abraham explain further, for his life is like a book under divine confiscation and never becomes publice juris [public property].’ See again The Book of Concord, Formula of Concord, especially Article VI. WL, 58, 102, 107, 142. WL, 141. WL, 77, emphasis in the original.

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and described this so it is impossible to see this imperative without receiving the presence of God.26 If God is absent, everything would become (and has become) confused. Kierkegaard gives an account of transformation, from one who obediently regards other people as neighbours from a distance to someone with the courage to love another person ‘despite and with his weaknesses and defects and imperfections’.27 This has to do with the context of an indebtedness, which makes comparison and measuring in love nonsensical. In his discussion of 1 Cor. 13.13, ‘Love Abides’, Kierkegaard exclaims, ‘Yes, praise God, love abides! . . . – if . . . in any of your actions, in any of your words you truly have had love as your confidant, take comfort, because love abides.’28 This ‘very upbuilding thought’ is of God’s love, which ‘sustains all existence’.29 To loop back into an earlier section in Works of Love, Kierkegaard suggests that, as God makes loving my neighbour a matter of incalculable grace, it becomes a task of ‘eternity’, not my own effort, to fulfill the ‘shall’ of ‘You Shall Love’.30 He writes, ‘only this shall eternally and happily saves from despair’, and a ‘love that has undergone eternity’s change by becoming duty is not exempted from misfortune, but it is saved from despair’.31 As I turn over to God the task of fulfilling the law, I receive the gift of seeing the world as a wonder, not a threat. This is too simple, in that Kierkegaard is clear this is no one-and-done conversion of the soul. And Kierkegaard also is clear in many of his writings that people do threaten one another with treachery, including the kind that manipulates someone’s trust. But he has also here described a kind of freedom, or lightness, that comes from seeing my neighbour as God’s own first, and myself as God’s beloved first. Kierkegaard makes a comparison between what it feels like to walk around in the world afraid you are going to fall on your face, and to walk around in the world in trust: It is well known how anxiously, how ineffectively, and yet how fearfully laboriously a person walks when he knows he is walking on smooth ice, but it is equally well known that a person walks confidently and firmly on smooth ice if because of darkness or in some other way he has remained unaware that he is walking on smooth ice.32 By releasing the responsibility to make love work through dint of my own effort, saved by God from that burden, I am freed. This leads me to be able to walk on ice – to love with courage. There are multiple ways that Kierkegaard makes the import of his deliberations practical. I will make this explicit in the section on how he writes about love gone badly. Note here his practical, pastoral wisdom requires an entire shift of scenery, even a shift of what a person is looking at and for. So, for example, his description that a truly loving person does not compare himself to another person, nor look closely in suspicion to see whether or not someone he loves loves him to a similar degree, is set within a context of God’s miraculous, sustaining, gratuitous presence. In the Denmark of Kierkegaard’s time – when people in Copenhagen were abuzz with anticipation of the newest means of conveyance, or the newest fashions from Europe – to claim that all that is, and all that

26

27 28 29 30 31 32

See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 95–158. WL, 158. WL, 300. WL, 301. WL, 42–3. WL, 42. WL, 186.

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makes life worth living, is set within a context of incalculability was odd. People were sizing one another up by what they could afford, even then. In his chapter ‘Mercifulness, a Work of Love’, he notes this: ‘Yet money, money, money! . . . how often might not one have been tempted despondently to turn one’s back on all existence and say, “Here lies a world for sale and only awaits a buyer”.’33 To use Holmer’s imagery, Kierkegaard describes the setting around him so a reader can see how calculated and/or calculating she has been taught to perceive reality itself. Kierkegaard closes Works of Love with a warning that the prudential ‘like for like’ beckons a person away from a context of grace. He warns that in a version of supposed reality where all that you hear is about what can be measured, then you yourself will be measured.34 Both then and now there were writers cordoning off certain spaces of existence as immeasurable – marriage, the family, something ineffable often called spirituality. But Kierkegaard takes all that exists, all knowledge, each wife, each child, each lily growing in the field, the reader herself, and claims them to be only in existence in grace.

II. ‘ALL OF WORLD HISTORY’ Kierkegaard’s emphasis, in Works of Love, on the singular importance of each neighbour, and his shift there of perspective away from assessing progress of love in time, may help readers, by way of contrast, to recognize the unspooling of Hegelianism today. To put the matter bluntly, up front, I want to help readers see how commonsensical it still seems to weigh oneself, assess one’s prospects and choose carefully which person may rightly be deemed a neighbour – all by a stair-step scheme that assesses and weighs and chooses regarding progress in time. The logic of a ‘moving stair’ that Holmer described for an earlier generation has, if anything, intensified. I will also use Philosophical Fragments to illumine how one pseudonym may help moral philosophers in particular to note an occupational hazard of our field. In our desire to be novel, useful or notably instructive, we may model a form of inquiry that leads more to confusion than to grace. Moral philosophy (or Christian ethics) may, in a region, school or other institution on the make, become a form of self-justification. A fine scholar may lose her birthright for a bowl of oatmeal. Kierkegaard created a pseudonym to write a book called Philosophical Fragments. The character is a thinker named Johannes Climacus, John the Climber, named after a sixth-century monk who wrote the The Ladder of Divine Ascent.35 The Climacus who authors Philosophical Fragments also writes a kind of poetic concatenation, but the links or steps do not climb upward. They tangle around like a finely linked necklace left in a drawer. As Howard and Edna Hong write in the introduction to their translation, this is ‘the most abstract of all Kierkegaard’s writings’.36 I would use the word ‘intricate’ rather than abstract. As I have already quoted, Paul Holmer suggests, at Kierkegaard’s time, ‘Most of the cultural energies seemed to be not only documented but also forecast by a philosophical scheme.’37 Kierkegaard’s playful earnestness in the book is one

33 34 35

36 37

WL, 319. WL, 384. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, trans. Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell (New York: Paulist Press, 1982). PF, xix. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 38.

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way to address a machinery of meaning into which the individual is supposed properly to find her place. Kara N. Slade and I wrote an article called ‘The Single Individual in Ordinary Time: Theological Engagement with Sociobiology’.38 We go into more depth about modern Hegelianism there. I will show what is apropos regarding love briefly here, then return again to Philosophical Fragments and Holy Communion in my conclusion to this chapter. Kierkegaard’s epigraph to Philosophical Fragments is a warning for anyone trying to create a coherent and thorough system of knowledge: ‘Better well hanged than ill wed’ (a paraphrase from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night).39 In his ‘Preface’ to a later book, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, Climacus (the same pseudonymous author) fills in this quotation, ‘better well hanged than by a hapless marriage to be brought into a systematic in-law relationship with the whole world’.40 Unless a Christian begins, and begins again, with Jesus Christ, she will find alluringly legitimating modes of authority, many diversions toward a career in the world of reason. Unless she begins with Jesus Christ, she may never know herself as a self or her neighbour as a neighbour. A focus on ‘the saviour’ may make a scholar look like a fool, but Kierkegaard recommends a kind of foolhardiness. Climacus writes in Philosophical Fragments that ‘to write a pamphlet is frivolity – but to promise the system, that is seriousness and has made many a man a supremely serious man both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others’.41 He explains, through a form of humour, that what appears to be serious is a way of avoiding the most difficult and yet worthwhile task of knowing oneself and loving other people. Kierkegaard’s interlocutors in Philosophical Fragments are people trying to show their inheritance of a coherent system. Hegel was the philosopher whose name had become synonymous with the creation of a system that explains everything. One of Kierkegaard’s deleted sections in Philosophical Fragments makes this clear: Too bad that Hegel lacked time; but if one is to dispose of all of world history, how does one get time for the little test as to whether the absolute method, which explains everything, is also able to explain the life of a single human being. In ancient times, one would have smiled at a method that can explain all of world history absolutely but cannot explain a single person even mediocrely.42 Kierkegaard reveals as fraudulent any form of thought that tries to explain ‘people’, because to explain everyone, and history, and reason itself, is to lose the possibility of knowing a single person ‘even mediocrely’. My assertion comes from reading Kierkegaard’s texts, pseudonymous and signed, in relation to Works of Love. Reading Philosophical Fragments in this way highlights that, in being ill-wed to a system of thought, a neo-Hegelian loses ‘ethics’. In a succinct essay, Julia Watkin named the cost: Loss of contact with ethics occurs firstly through the thinker’s make-believe standpoint in which he or she takes some fantastical God’s-eye position outside the universe, that is, outside existence. Since objective thinking, in that it concerns description of the world, has no relation to the individual thinker’s personal life, daily life becomes 38

39 40 41 42

Amy Laura Hall and Kara N. Slade, ‘The Single Individual in Ordinary Time: Theological Engagement with Sociobiology ’, Studies in Christian Ethics 26, no. 1 (2013): 66–82. PF, 3. CUP, 5. PF, 109. PF, 206.

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an inconvenient appendage to the great work of System-building [CUP, 119, 122–3]. Secondly, there is a loss of ethics in the Hegelian-style System because it contains ethics and morality as a necessary process. Yet in a necessary process there can be no freedom and hence no ethics.43 When your description begins within a system that has its own working assumptions, the description holds within the description a particular way of seeing human beings. To combine the words of these two close readers of Kierkegaard’s words (Holmer’s with Watkin’s) as people who determine the rules of legitimate speech define objectivity as the capacity to fit within a system, and that system carries within it also a sense of ‘necessary process’, there can be no single individual apart from the all-encompassing system and, in a way, no sense that ethics pertains to daily life. As Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love, each aspect of an individual’s daily life matters, and matters in a way that frees an individual not only from her own self-legitimizing projects but also from a system that has taught her to find and stay in her place within a system of meaning. I here name two examples of contemporary, influential writers whose popularity highlights the existence of the moving stair. Bestselling moralist David Brooks writes and speaks about ethics. He writes in The Road to Character that a primary problem people face in the early-twentieth-century is selfish individualism.44 In a condensed essay called ‘The Moral Bucket List’ Brooks diagnoses the problem facing his reading public with this phrase: ‘the culture of the Big Me’.45 Brooks highlights three women he believes worthy of emulating to rectify what he determines to be the complex of a ‘Big Me’. By his narration, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins was ‘shamed’ and ‘purified’ on her way towards losing her ‘Big Me’. In this moral development, Frances Perkins ‘turned herself into an instrument’. (Brooks means this as a goalpost, not a criticism.) Founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, Dorothy Day, was saved by the birth of her daughter, by Brooks’s account, which moved Day from living a ‘disorganized’ life to one of direction. Becoming a mother, as he narrates it, allowed Day to lose what he calls ‘the natural self-centeredness all of us feel’. Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the pseudonym George Eliot, was ‘stabilized’, he explains, by choosing a good man. Her life as a writer flourished because she found a partner to be her psychological splint. Frances Perkins is saved by becoming an instrument, Dorothy Day is saved by childbearing and Mary Ann Evans is saved by a good man. David Brooks writes in a form of moralism that does not exist within a context of grace but a context of self-improvement. Into a vacuum, Brooks inserts serviceable hagiographies of three complicated, merely mortal women. The problem, as he writes it, is a ‘Big Me’, and so three women become serviceable icons for the project of ‘Us’, instruments for a larger purpose. He continues, The people on this road see the moments of suffering as pieces of a larger narrative. They are not really living for happiness, as it is conventionally defined. They see life as

43

44 45

Julia Watkin, ‘Boom! The Earth Is Round! – On the Impossibility of an Existential System’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 95–113 [101]. David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2015). David Brooks, ‘The Moral Bucket List’, New York Times, 11 April 2015. Available online: https://www. nytimes.com/2015/04/12/opinion/sunday/david-brooks-the-moral-bucket-list.html?_r=0 (accessed 24 December 2017).

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a moral drama and feel fulfilled only when they are enmeshed in a struggle on behalf of some ideal. Brooks’s prescription for his readers is different than the disorientation Kierkegaard attempts in Works of Love. Kierkegaard describes a relation where an individual becomes God’s own, confiscated and held in a way that she becomes not an instrument of anyone’s project. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who won the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology in 2001. By his account, organized religion is useful inasmuch as it binds individuals toward a clear goal; the celebration of violence is functional inasmuch as it allows disparate groups to identify themselves as a nation state; and patriotism is natural and conducive to overall human flourishing because it channels biological instincts toward a common good. Group thinking helps ‘suppress our inner chimp and bring out our inner bee’, allowing for a ‘hive’ mentality. In his book The Righteous Mind, Haidt applies these basics to work: [A]n organization that takes advantage of our hivish nature can activate pride, loyalty and enthusiasm amongst employees and then monitor them less closely. This approach to leadership (sometimes called transformational leadership) generates more social capital – the bonds of trust that help employees get more work done at a lower cost than employees at other firms. Hivish employees work harder, have more fun, and are less likely to quit or to sue the company.46 In another essay, ‘Doing Science as If Groups Existed’, he makes a case against the ‘spell’ of ‘methodological individualism’, a ‘belief system’ that limits an evolutionary perspective on ‘group level selection’ and downplays the benefits of living in ‘bee-like ways’. He recommends evolutionary scientists appreciate the goods of organized religion: ‘Like fraternities, religions may generate many positive externalities, including charity, social capital (based on shared trust), and even team spirit (patriotism).’47 In June 2016, Haidt promoted an article in Fast Company that recommends workers may do better if we compare ourselves to others. ‘You Should Probably Compare Yourself to Others More, Not Less’ is the title of the essay, and it continues with the headline, ‘Comparing yourself to others is frowned upon because it leads to envy, but even that can be productive.’48 Haidt combines Hegelianism with self-striving. Kierkegaard disorients an individual to see grace as the proper context of finding self and neighbour. Haidt defines ethics as instrumental to a larger project. Whereas Kierkegaard warns in Works of Love that comparison is a poison that destroys any life worth living, because comparison destroys love, Haidt recommends comparison as a way to live a life of meaning.49

46

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48

49

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012), 237–8. Jonathan Haidt, ‘Doing Science as If Groups Existed: Jonathan Haidt Replies to David Sloan Wilson, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, PZ Myers, Marc D. Hauser ’, Edge. Available online: http://www.edge.org/discourse/ moral_religion.html (accessed 24 December 2017). David Mayer, ‘ You Should Probably Compare Yourself to Others More, Not Less’, Fast Company, 17 June 2016. Available online: http://www.fastcompany.com/3060994/your-most-productive-self/you-shouldprobably-compare-yourself-to-others-more-not-less (accessed 24 December 2017). Jonathan Haidt also discerns altruism in relation to killing. Jonathan Haidt, ‘Why We Celebrate a Killing’, New York Times, 7 May 2011. Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/opinion/08haidt.html (accessed 24 December 2017).

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Neither Haidt nor Brooks writes from within a particular faith tradition. Their writings are shared and promoted by Christian publications. They are invited frequently to Christian colleges and universities to speak about altruism, decency and ethics. (Each one has spoken at Duke University on these themes in the last few years). When combined with an assumption that providence, nature or both has set up the structures of power in a family, a region or a nation, conformity with social expectations can pass as faithfulness to the natural order of things. And nonconformity, or refusal to be obviously of service to social expectations, can pass as transgression and/or nonsense.

III. LOVE AND CONSCIENCE We do not know ourselves. We cannot even begin to know our neighbour. But we may begin to know we are beloved by God. Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love, ‘We speak of a man’s conscientiously loving his wife or his friend or those nearest and dearest to him, but we often speak in a way that involves a great misconception.’50 In a footnote in Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard makes an important point about the assumptions required for an assessment of ethics within an all-encompassing system of thought. After the pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, suggests ‘let us assume that we know what a human being is’, Kierkegaard, as editor of the book, uses a footnote to play around with the word ‘assume’. After all, Kierkegaard suggests, does not ‘assume’ itself assume some sense of ‘doubt’? And, ‘in our theocentric age’ doesn’t everyone ‘know . . . what a human being is’? His emphasis here is on the word ‘know’. Kierkegaard then relates a story of skepticism whereby ‘man is what we all know’, and, because ‘we all know what a dog is’, it follows that ‘man is a dog’.51 It is characteristic of Kierkegaard to place a key point in a seemingly tangential footnote, using what seems like a child’s joke. It is precisely the case, he intimates, that I have no idea who I am, and that I am not in any sort of position to discover who I am, without receiving myself as a gift. One clever character in his book Either/Or puts this beautifully: ‘When I consider its various epochs, my life is like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which first of all means a string, and second a daughterin-law. All that is lacking is that in the third place the word Schnur means a camel, in the fourth a whisk broom.’52 This character, given only the name ‘A’, incites the reader to ask, ‘What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding?’ ‘A’ gives a kind of prayer after [H]umans, far more than other primates, were shaped by natural selection acting at two different levels simultaneously. There’s the lower level at which individuals compete relentlessly with other individuals within their own groups. This competition rewards selfishness. But there’s also a higher level at which groups compete with other groups. This competition favors groups that can best come together and act as one. Only a few species have found a way to do this. Bees, ants and termites are the best examples. Their brains and bodies are specialized for working as a team to accomplish nearly miraculous feats of cooperation like hive construction and group defense . . . We have all the old selfish programming of other primates, but we also have a more recent overlay that makes us able to become, briefly, hive creatures like bees . . . This two-layer psychology is the key to understanding religion, warfare, team sports and last week’s celebrations. . . . [Émile Durkheim’s theory of] ‘collective effervescence’ . . . [describes] the passion and ecstasy that is found in tribal religious rituals when communities come together to sing, dance around a fire and dissolve the boundaries that separate them from each other . . . [Reflecting on American celebrations after the killing of Osama bin Laden, Haidt argues that the] celebrations were good and healthy. America achieved its goal – bravely and decisively – after ten painful years. People who love their country sought out one another to share collective effervescence. They stepped out of their petty and partisan selves and became, briefly, just Americans rejoicing together. 50 51 52

WL, 142. PF, 38. EO1, 36.

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this: ‘God knows what our Lord actually intended with me or what he wants to make of me.’53 In Works of Love, Kierkegaard states that ‘it is God who by himself and by means of the middle term “neighbor” checks on whether the love for wife and friend is conscientious’. Only in this way is love ‘a matter of conscience’.54 The ‘great misconception’ Kierkegaard names is that having a preference, a friendship, an intimacy or goal in common, secures that ‘love’ is really ‘love’. Pulling us out of this assumption is a significant part of his effort in the book. This aspect of his work leads him to write sections so focused on the incalculability of life that some justice-oriented students in my class have dismissed him. Kierkegaard seems to some readers to lead towards a romanticizing of poverty, or at least a neglect of the real, material circumstances of someone who has nothing. In one passage, in his chapter ‘Mercifulness, a Work of Love’, he writes about the ‘woman who laid two pennies in the temple box’, a reference to Lk. 21.1-4. Kierkegaard accentuates the meaning of the story, adding that ‘a swindler’ had ‘tricked her out of [her coin cloth] and put instead an identical cloth in which where was nothing’, so that the woman actually, unbeknownst to her, comes to the temple with nothing.55 Kierkegaard’s point here is not that a life of starvation is better than a life that includes food. His point here is that ‘the world understands only about money – and Christ only about mercifulness’.56 He continues, ‘mercifulness is infinitely unrelated to money.’57 Kierkegaard has taken the calculation away from love between lovers and from love between neighbours. To put another person within a system, and see that person as a part of a system of any sort of project, or, to use Holmer’s phrase again, as a part of the ‘moving stair that history is supposed to be’, is to lose that person as a person. Kierkegaard takes in every human relation – from the bedroom to the workplace to the hustle-bustle of the Danish fashion scene – and submits it to the test of this little word ‘neighbour’, revealing that what often passes as the appearance of Christianity is a sham. And these fabrications become substantial because the thinkers of his time had cast the world according to a particular way of perceiving all that is. Holmer’s description again notes this: Most of the cultural energies seemed to be not only documented but also forecast by a philosophical scheme. General as it was and tolerant of all kinds of opposition, that philosophy became the climate of opinion within which programs were projected, political policies evaluated, education measured and perpetrated. Even religion was so prefigured.58 People could walk around thinking they are known and that they know themselves, evaluated, educated and measured, religiously assessed, by this scheme that was midcentury Hegelianism. Kierkegaard uses the imagery of vision repeatedly in Works of Love; to see another person as part of a project is to see oneself as part of a project. One of his extended passages on vision redefines aesthetics, casting the term ‘artist’ as someone who ‘by bringing a certain something with him found right on the spot what the well-traveled

53 54 55 56 57 58

EO1, 21, 26. WL, 142. WL, 317–18. WL, 318. WL, 158. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 38.

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artist did not find anywhere in the world – perhaps because he did not bring a certain something with him’.59 He asks what it would be like if artistry ‘only fastidiously discovered that none of us is beautiful!’ and in this way made love into a ‘curse’, revealing that ‘none of us is worth loving’.60 Trying to determine where to place another human being on a continuum of any sort – and this includes oneself – is to make a category error as a Christian. It is to see another person but not see her at all. The middle term ‘neighbour’ that God illumines also illumines a person who is ‘worth’ nothing, because ‘worth’ means nothing in a context of love. This includes the person in the mirror. I am not the word Schnur in the dictionary, you are not a whisk broom, because God created us out of nothing and recreates us daily. One of Kierkegaard’s characters names what is at stake in the ‘misconception’ or ‘misunderstanding’ that may result if we see ourselves and others without the ‘middle term’ of ‘neighbour’. Kierkegaard has a section in a long book called Stages on Life’s Way that convenes a group of men talking about ‘woman’. Joking to his ‘fellow conspirators’ in a section named ‘In Vino Veritas’, a character known as the ‘Fashion Designer’ boasts of his ability to convince a human being that she functions only for assessment and adornment. Various other men at the banquet have offered soliloquies on ‘woman’, after having designated that ‘woman’ is not to be allowed in the room. To make a complicatedly dehumanizing text simple, Kierkegaard uses different characters to embody different subtle and overt ways that women have been designated by men as incapable of true friendship, citizenship, pedagogy or camaraderie. The Designer counters with ‘woman does have spirit’ and is quite ‘reflective’. ‘Woman’ therefore cannot be let off the hook of ethics, so to speak, as easily as some of the men in the room assert. The Designer means by this that ‘woman’ has a capacity to know truth but that she is easily tricked to subsume herself and truth itself in a game that has no meaning at all. He continues, is ‘woman’ not able infinitely to transform all that is sacred into that which is ‘suitable for adornment’?61 As the ‘high priest’ of this sustained joke, the Fashion Designer vows that, eventually, the ‘woman’, by submitting herself to the world of fashion, ‘is going to wear a ring in her nose’.62 In my book on love and treachery, I detail how Kierkegaard creates characters who give life to ways of seeing that preclude actually seeing another person as a person. I spend less time in that book describing how Kierkegaard interrupts a system of thought that erases the viewer herself as a self. I do briefly discuss a section in Either/Or entitled ‘Silhouettes’. In the preface to ‘Silhouettes’, the character who pens the section, the character ‘A’, offers a warning: ‘Foresworn may love at all times be; / Love-magic lulls down in this cave / The soul surprised, intoxicated, / In forgetfulness of any oath.’63 The oath forgotten, supplanted and distorted in this section is a woman’s covenant with God. ‘A’ draws on different stories in which women erased themselves in an attempt to approximate what they think is love, defined within a context other than God as the ‘middle term’. The shadowy women attempt to find some self-indicting explanation for their abysmal treatment by bad lovers, to avoid rethinking the system that has defined for them their place within that system. Their attempt to find coherent meaning leads them

59 60 61 62 63

WL, 158. WL, 158. SLW, 67. SLW, 71. EO1, 166.

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elastically to reconfigure what they otherwise would have to face as their violation by the person they ostensibly ‘love’.64 The elasticity and resilience of their devotion might seem initially similar to Kierkegaard’s description of the love which, indebted to God, ‘hides a multitude of sins’ and abides in spite of the faults of one’s lover.65 But their veneration is a distortion of God’s command for love to ‘abide’ as Kierkegaard describes it in Works of Love. God is absent, the middle term is missing and no one is a neighbour. The women in that section of Kierkegaard’s perceptive writing have become lost as selves, and they do not even know they are lost. The Fashion Designer of Stages on Life’s Way seems right after all. The temptation to find a way to be useful to a larger project – whether the project be ostensibly good, true, beautiful or merely lucrative – remains strong. When asked to describe Kierkegaard’s Works of Love to a new reader, I have compared his book to novelist Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.66 In a different form, a few decades after Kierkegaard, Wharton digs up layer through layer of the false wisdom making up nineteenth-century New York society, revealing a complex system of propriety and property, station and money. The book’s title notes that Wharton’s work is a reflection on Eccl. 7.4-5: ‘The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise than to hear the song of fools.’ The heroine, Lily Bart, tries to secure her place in a system arbitrated in part by the propriety of women like her aunt, Mrs Peniston. In one scene, while Lily is relating to her aunt the details of a wedding that her aunt deigned not to attend, Wharton underscores the title of the book: Mrs. Peniston rose abruptly, and, advancing to the ormolu clock surmounted by a helmeted Minerva, which throned on the chimney-piece between two malachite vases, passed her lace handkerchief between the helmet and its visor. ‘I knew it – the parlour maid never dusts there!’ she exclaimed, triumphantly displaying a minute spot on the handkerchief; then, reseating herself, she went on.67 Within the world Edith Wharton depicts, Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, has become an adornment, sitting ‘throned on the chimney piece between two malachite vases’. In Wharton’s New York, much like Kierkegaard’s Denmark, fashion plus seemliness plus upward mobility equal a kind of providence. Lack of beauty, any sort of disruption and downward association are marks of divine disfavour. Knowing one’s place is the definition of morality: ‘dread of a scene gave her an inexorableness which the greatest strength of character could not have produced, since it was independent of all considerations of right or wrong,’ and, again, regarding Mrs Peniston, she ‘had kept her imagination shrouded, like the drawing-room furniture’, and any disruption of decorum leaves her ‘as much aghast as if she had been accused of leaving her carpets down all summer, or of violating any of the other cardinal laws of housekeeping’.68 Mrs Peniston avoids knowledge of anything that might disturb her peace: ‘the mere idea of immorality was as offensive to Mrs. Peniston as a smell of cooking in the drawing room.’69 She sees Lily’s difficulties

64 65 66 67 68 69

EO1, 180. WL, 289. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Scribner Paperback, 1995). Ibid., 160. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 186.

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navigating what Holmer might call the ‘moving stair’ of their system as a kind of ‘contagious illness’. This is not one woman’s idiosyncrasy. Wharton narrates the general religiosity baptizing the configuration of morality: The observance of Sunday at Belmont was chiefly marked by the punctual appearance of the smart omnibus destined to convey the household to the little church at the gates. Whether any one got into the omnibus or not was a matter of secondary importance, since by standing there it not only bore witness to the orthodox intentions of the family, but made Mrs. Trenor feel, when she finally heard it drive away, that she had somehow vicariously made use of it.70 And in another passage: ‘The Wetheralls always went to church . . . Mr. and Mrs. Wetherall’s circle was so large that God was included in their visiting-list.’71 Very much as Kierkegaard describes his own Denmark, God becomes the guarantor of propriety and property, and Christianity a matter of decorum. Rather than living a life under divine confiscation, known and knowing one’s life as a profligate gift from God, God becomes an acquaintance you might consider visiting when not otherwise occupied with the real work of navigating the ‘moving stair’. The characters in The House of Mirth, as with the many characters in Kierkegaard’s corpus, variously strive to maintain their status or climb upward by wits, beauty, subterfuge and inheritance. The task is to navigate that system. Lily Bart, the heroine in The House of Mirth, is alternatively the meticulous planner of circumstances and the ‘victim of the civilization which had produced her . . . the links of her bracelet seem[ing] like manacles chaining her to her fate’.72 Lily is decidedly, perpetually unwed, spoiling chance after chance for marriage, but she is also certain that she must attach herself. As Wharton words it, Lily Bart attempts to ‘sustain the weight of human vanity’ on mere ‘threads’.73 Always ‘in an attitude of uneasy alertness toward every possibility of life’, Lily seeks carefully to spin and to step while also entangled in a complex web much larger than herself.74 Lily both chooses and is entrapped. She commits suicide, and, according to the system of morality governing her life, the specifics of her destruction do not matter: ‘ “The whole truth?” Miss Bart laughed. “What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story that is easiest to believe”.’75 Wharton makes a similar observation about the fragility of love as Kierkegaard has made in his writings about love: ‘She was realizing for the first time that a woman’s dignity may cost more to keep up than her carriage; and that the maintenance of a moral attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents, made the world appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it.’76 ‘Church’, in the novel, is not a place for refuge. Church is a place of judgement. But Wharton ends the narrative with an eye-blink moment of life together. Wharton takes her reader into the world hidden from the women and men who cast Lily out. As Lily notes early on, ‘Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.’77 This is the ‘luxurious world, whose machinery 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Ibid., 82. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 319. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 117.

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is so carefully concealed that one scene flows into another without perceptible agency’.78 It is not in luxury that Lily glimpses hope but in the home of a friend she has made, in what we might call the unconcealed machinery. This other young woman’s home has ‘the frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff – a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss’.79

IV.

BELIEF

Holmer notes about Kierkegaard’s time, ‘To fathom the regularities of the world plan and know one’s place in it seemed the only philosophical and “objective” thing to do.’80 In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard uses a pseudonym to offer one of many interventions into this working assumption: ‘Thus at no moment does the past become necessary, no more than it was necessary when it came into existence or appeared necessary to the contemporary who believed it – that is, believed that it had come into existence.’81 Kierkegaard asks the reader to imagine a world such that the machinery is not the world plan. What would it take to imagine ‘one’s place’ as more like (to use Wharton’s words) ‘the frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff ’? What kind of reconfiguring of vision does it take to receive one’s life as a miracle? What is your own working definition of a miracle? People around me use the word for a gift that does not fit their usual sense of how the world works. Kierkegaard uses this working definition of miracle and suggests that the world works according to the miraculous. He changes the working order of the world and the usual meaning of this word. The conundrum of existence, in Philosophical Fragments, is a matter of love. Through Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard invites the reader into the singular importance of Phil. 2.5-11: God came in time, as a servant, to seek, in love, nothing less than equality with each one of us. In his ‘fairy tale’ of a king and a beloved maiden, Climacus connects the existence of a true self not with our ascent upward out of untruth toward truth but with God’s descent toward us, in time, out of love. ‘If the moment is to have decisive significance,’ so the refrain of Philosophical Fragments goes, ‘the god’s love . . . must be not only an assisting love but also a procreative love by which he gives birth to the learner.’82 It is within such a relation of love that I receive myself and a neighbour to love. What Kierkegaard spends hundreds of pages narrating in Works of Love, Climacus depicts briefly in a scene of philosophical sparring: the wonder of life is love, and God’s grace in Jesus creates both a lover and a beloved. In a section entitled ‘Interlude’, Climacus introduces the non-necessity of existence as requisite for individuality and freedom, and he recommends this ‘Interlude’ as an intermission, to take up time between his discussion of the contemporary follower of the saviour and the one who follows the saviour many centuries after the saviour’s death. Kierkegaard plays a helpful, philosophical game with his readers, making an oblique case for God’s gratuitous love as the continued, sustaining given.

78 79 80 81 82

Ibid., 424. Ibid., 448. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 25. PF, 86, found in the ‘Interlude’, PF, 72–88. PF, 30–1.

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Philosophical Fragments is not only about grace generally but also about a very specific, embodied practice of grace. By Kierkegaard’s reckoning, love is not necessary, and the presence of God in time is a miracle. Love is free and more akin to magic, more conducive to fairy poetry than to prose. The ‘Interlude’ dwells on the non-necessity of the actual, on the freely occurring present that exists because of the incarnation of Jesus Christ. And this section in the book connects the situation of the contemporary follower, who sees the saviour face to face, and the current follower, who seemingly follows at a distance of centuries. Climacus suggests that his own readers, by grace, encounter the same presence of the saviour as did the saviour’s original followers, through the moment that is the eternal in time. I believe he is intimating Holy Communion. He writes, ‘But, humanly speaking, consequences built upon a paradox are built upon the abyss, and the total content of the consequences, which is handed down to the single individual only under the agreement that it is by virtue of a paradox, is not to be passed on like real estate, since the whole thing is in suspense.’83 Howard and Edna Hong note the Danish word Afgrund that Kierkegaard uses, which they translate as ‘abyss’, means, literally, ‘without ground’.84 The paradox of God in time, of Jesus Christ, is groundless, and the moment that Jesus Christ is present for each individual is inexplicable. If I consider the work of love that is God as if it is a piece of real estate, I have not only missed the point. I am in a different worldview. If I consider the work of love that is God as an on the scene, journalistic photo opportunity, I have not only missed the point. I am in a different worldview. In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard names two temptations for the ‘Follower at Second Hand’. I will attempt to secure the groundless possibility of Jesus Christ’s presence in something that makes sense to reasonable people. I may try to anchor Jesus Christ’s presence by taking on the role of the Holy Spirit, using my eyewitness account of holiness to prove that I am first-hand.85 Kierkegaard writes truth through his pseudonyms. Johannes de Silentio (in Fear and Trembling) talks too much, but he also knows that he does not know what he is talking about. My best response, in the real presence of the one who makes me actually, magically, present, is wonder. This is the creation and recreation of an individual in time – the individual created and sustained each moment by the grace-filled presence of Jesus Christ in Holy Communion. This brings us back to Kierkegaard’s straight-up notation in Works of Love: ‘When we speak this way, we are speaking of the love that sustains all existence, of God’s love. If for one moment, one single moment, it were to be absent, everything would be confused.’86 As a follower at second-hand, someone who lives millennia after Jesus has been crucified and resurrected, I am faced with the challenge of finding him. I am no different than Mary, Peter or Paul. Do I prove his presence? Do I prove I am present with him, catapulting myself through centuries to show his truth? If I do, I treat God’s gift of love as real estate, as something traded. The presence of Jesus Christ in Holy Communion is a miracle – a holy caprice. The presence of my neighbour as a command from God is also a miracle – a holy caprice. I receive love and know love as a gift, a nest, hanging over an abyss, held and sustained.

83 84 85

86

PF, 98. PF, 317n19. PF, 254. From JP 3:3792, p. 763: ‘But when the possibility of repetition is posited, then the question of its actuality arises: is it actually a repetition.’ WL, 301.

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FURTHER READING Mackey, Louis. Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Mooney, Edward. Selves in Discord and Resolve: Kierkegaard’s Moral-Religious Psychology From ‘Either/Or’ to ‘Sickness unto Death’. New York: Routledge, 1996. Müller, Paul. Kierkegaard’s ‘Works of Love’: Christian Ethics and the Maieutic Ideal, translated by C. Stephen Evans and Jan Evans. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1992. Watkin, Julia. Kierkegaard. New York: Continuum, 1997.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Eschatology: ‘And Eternally Speak with My Jesus’ ANDREW J. BURGESS

INTRODUCTION Several years before he died, Kierkegaard wrote a note asking that a verse from the Pietist hymn writer Hans Adolph Brorson be engraved as his epitaph on a tablet at the family tombstone: In a little while / I shall have won. Then the whole fight / Will all at once be done. Then I may rest / In bowers of roses And eternally / And eternally / Speak with my Jesus.1 Kierkegaard’s firm conviction about personal immortality played a decisive role in the formation of his philosophical and theological views until his death in 1855. Does Kierkegaard even have an eschatology, beyond a set of personal convictions suitable for engraving on a tombstone? The number of pages Kierkegaard’s published works devoted specifically to eschatology are few, compared to those devoted to many other topics. In Kierkegaard and Theology, Murray Rae remarks that Kierkegaard’s works contain ‘very little by way of eschatology except for the reminder that the decisions of faith bear upon an individual’s eternal destiny’.2 This does not mean, however, that eschatology is either absent or rare in his writings. Instead, the reason the topic of eschatology may seem hard to locate there is that it is seamlessly integrated into the overall argument of his theology, so that, properly interpreted, Kierkegaard’s thought is about as thoroughly eschatological as any Christian theology can possibly be. The outline of Kierkegaard’s eschatology can be stated simply. After discussing Plato’s Phaedo in his dissertation, The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard contrasts, in his 1843–4 upbuilding discourses, immortality as gift (for the prophet Anna), on the one hand, with immortality as task (for the Apostle Paul), on the other. Starting in 1847, moreover, he puts out five late works, representing resurrection as law and focusing on judgement, paired with a set of communion discourses, representing resurrection as gospel and

1

2

LD, Document no. XX, 27 / SKS 28, Brev 39 [Letter no. 39], pp. 66–7. Translation modified. This verse is the fifth from Brorson’s hymn ‘Hallelujah! I Have Found My Jesus!’ in the edition Kierkegaard had in his personal library. In her editorial notes, Elise Iuul estimates that Kierkegaard wrote the letter in 1846 or 1847. SKSK 28, p. 42. Kierkegaard died in 1855. Murray Rae, Kierkegaard and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 3.

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focusing on eternal happiness. The result is that Kierkegaard’s writings present traditional Lutheran eschatological motifs in a highly non-traditional, sermonic – one might even say Socratic – format. The reason the doctrines about the afterlife are so important for Kierkegaard is that in Europe during the middle of the nineteenth century, Christian theology is in crisis. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus describes the situation well in Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), when he compares himself to a poor lodger, in a garret room high up in an enormous building, who ‘has a premonitory suspicion that there must be a flaw somewhere or other in the foundations’ of theology without knowing ‘how or where’ that flaw may be.3 One such textbook Kierkegaard used as a student was Hutterus Redivivus (‘Hutter renewed’).4 That manual contains source materials from post-Reformation Lutheran Orthodox theology, at a time when Cartesian ideals of ‘clarity and distinctness’ ruled, tight logical systems provided the models for scholarship and proofs for the immortality of the soul still played a central role in Christian apologetics.5 Neither Kierkegaard nor his pseudonym Climacus have any great problem with such ‘old fashioned orthodoxy’ itself, as long as it is delivered in its ‘rightful severity’.6 Still, both of them feel that there is something awry, not only in the Cartesian theologies of the past but also in the theological systems that rivaled to succeed them.

I. KIERKEGAARD AND THE DANISH DEBATE OVER IMMORTALITY: 1832–41 While the Danish debate over the immortality of the individual soul is conducted almost exclusively among philosophers, it is also a religious debate, and one in which Kierkegaard’s dissertation plays a major, perhaps even decisive, role.7 The crucial point for Kierkegaard, as for Socrates before him, is that excellence in aesthetic, ethical or religious matters does not depend upon having infallible knowledge and is equally open to the learned and the unlearned alike.

P. M. Møller and Origins of the Danish Debate over Immortality, 1832–8 One side of the Danish debate on immortality featured two figures who promoted G. W. F. Hegel’s speculative philosophy in Denmark. In 1832 Johann Ludwig Heiberg 3 4

5

6 7

CUP, 63 / SKS 7, 65. [Karl August von Hase], Hutterus redivivus oder Dogmatik der evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche; Ein dogmatisches Repertorium für Studierende (‘Hutter renewed, or, The dogmatics of the evangelical church: A repository of source material in dogmatics, for students’), 4th rev. edn (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1839). Successive editions of Hutterus Redivivus were translated into Danish, and Kierkegaard’s professor of dogmatics, H. N. Clausen, although a moderate rationalist, cites it frequently in his lectures. The editors of Kierkegaard’s works have located scores of implicit references to it throughout his writings. Cf. SKP XII, p. 50. CUP, 275 / SKS 7, 250. Cf. Tamara Monet Marks, ‘Kierkegaard’s “New Argument” for Immortality ’, Journal of Religious Ethics 38, no. 1 (2010): 143–86, esp. 149–54; Jon Stewart, ‘Poul Martin Møller and the Danish Debate about Immortality in the Wake of Hegel’s Philosophy ’, Estudios Kierkegaardianos: Revista de Filosofía 1 (2015): 115–46. István Czakó, ‘Der Ausbruch der Debatte nach der Veröffentlichung von Hegels religionsphilosophischen Vorlesungen’, in Geist und Unsterblichkeit: Grundprobleme der Religionsphilosophie und Eschatologie im Denken Søren Kierkegaards, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, 29 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), sec. 1.4, pp. 128–40; and Czakó, ‘Hegel and the Immortality Debate’, in Johan Ludvig Heiberg: Philosopher, Littérateur, Dramaturge and Political Thinker, ed. Jon Stewart, Danish Golden Age Series, no. 5 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2008), 95–138, esp. 101–9.

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(1791–1860), a prominent dramatist and aesthetician, opened the Danish immortality debate,8 joined in 1836 by the young theologian Hans Lassen Martensen (1808–1884). Even after Martensen moved on to other things, Heiberg persisted in his campaign to popularize Hegel’s ideas in Copenhagen, and in 1841 he even wrote and produced a comic play, ‘A Soul After Death,’ in which contemporary Copenhagen serves as the setting for hell.9 On the other side of the immortality debate, in 1838 Professor Poul Martin Møller (1794–1838) published ‘Thoughts on the Possibility of Proofs for the Immortality of Human Beings with Reference to the Most Recent Literature on the Subject’,10 which marks a turning point in the Danish debate and soon has a major effect upon Kierkegaard’s discussion of immortality as well. Although Møller had participated in the Danish circle studying Hegel when he first came to the University of Copenhagen, he later turned sharply against Hegelian philosophy. Early in Møller’s time in Copenhagen, for example, one student in Copenhagen had even reported Møller had told him that he was ‘fully convinced there was no immortality, and he felt fully content with that’ and he was ‘glad that now, through philosophy (Hegel), he had attained completely firm and infallible knowledge’.11 The death of his first wife Betty in 1834, however, leads him to reflect deeply on personal immortality and eternal life. In a letter to Betty’s mother six months later, he wrote, concerning their shared sorrow: ‘The grievous departure we both have experienced has made the thought of another and higher life more vital and present to me than it ever was before.’12 Møller’s famous 1837 treatise on human immortality reflects that change of mind in a key passage, where he writes that ‘love that views its object as perishable is by necessity of a different nature than the love that knows its object to belong to what eternally exists’.13 Almost a decade later, in 1846, Kierkegaard’s Climacus praises Møller’s treatise for managing to deal with ‘the infinite difficulty of the question of immortality when it is made simple [eenfoldig]’,14 ‘when the question is not about a new demonstration and

8

9

10

11

12

13 14

J. L. Heiberg, Grundtræk til Philosophiens Philosophie eller den speculative Logik. Som Ledetraad ved Forelæsninger paa den kongelige militaire Høiskole (Copenhagen: Andreas Seidelin, 1832), sec. 177 ‘Remark’, in Heiberg’s Speculative Logic and Other Texts, trans. Jon Stewart, Texts from Golden Age Denmark, no. 2 (Copenhagen: Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre and C. A. Reitzel, 2006), 196–9 [198]. Cf. Stewart, ‘Danish Debate’, 137. J. L. Heiberg, ‘En sjæl efter døden’ (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1921); trans. Sven Hakon Rossel and Henry Meyer, A Soul After Death (Seattle, WA: Mermaid Press, 1991); partial translation only. Poul Martin Møller, ‘Tanker over Muligheden af Beviser for Menneskets Udødelighed med Hensyn til den nyeste derhen hørende Literatur ’, Maanedsskrift for Litteratur 17 (1837): 1–72, 422–53. Reprinted in Møller, Efterladte Skrifter, 3rd edn, vol. 5 (Copenhagen: Reitzels, 1855–6), 38–140. Cited hereafter as Efterladte Skrifter. The translation, and the preface to the translation, used for this chapter are both from an unpublished translation made by the late Professor Reidar Thomte at Concordia College, Moorhead, MN. I am grateful to Arthur Montgomery of the Thomte family for permission to use them here, as well as to Professor George Connell of the Concordia College Philosophy Department for helping to arrange this permission. Translation cited hereafter as ‘Thomte, “Immortality” ’. Uffe Andreasen, Poul Møller og Romantismen: den filosofiske idealisme i Poul Møllers senere forfatterskab (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1973), 62. Martin Brorup, ed., Poul Møller og hans Familie i Breve: II 1830–38 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1976), 70. Trans. Thomte, in the preface to Thomte, ‘Immortality’, 3. Although the salutation of the letter is only to ‘Mother’, the editor indicates that it is meant for his late wife’s mother, not his own. Mőller, Efterladte Skrifter, 89–90. Thomte, ‘Immortality’, 115–16. The word ‘simple’ here does not mean ‘uncomplicated’ or ‘simple-minded’ but ‘unlearned’, that is, characteristic of ‘the common man’s understanding of life’. Udo Doedens, ‘The Notion of “Simplicity” and the word EENFOLD: A Central Idea in Søren Kierkegaard’s Authorship’, in Anthropology and Authority: Essays on

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about the opinions, strung on a thread, of Tom, Dick, and Harry’.15 Climacus’s point here is that the question of immortality is, when properly understood, not a ‘learned’ question, for specialists in philosophy to demonstrate through proofs, but a personal question, an ethical question and (in Climacus’s special vocabulary) a subjective question, which each person ‘by becoming subjective must ask himself ’.16 It is not the question whether human beings in general are immortal but whether I am immortal – and, if so, how I need to transform my life right now if am immortal.17

Kierkegaard’s Dissertation as a Contribution to the Debate on Immortality, 1837–41 Several years after Møller’s death, Kierkegaard’s 1841 dissertation, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, picks up right where Møller’s 1837 treatise on immortality leaves off. In Socrates Kierkegaard finds a powerful ally, whose critique of thinkers of ancient Greece he can reshape into an effective weapon against those ‘speculative’ philosophers and theologians of his own time who claim to have a special, philosophical knowledge of such religious concepts as personal immortality. Near the beginning, Kierkegaard’s dissertation draws a sharp distinction between two models for scholarship, one practiced by Plato and the other by his teacher Socrates.18 Plato follows the standard scholarly route in most academic fields, of using abstraction to find the fundamental concepts and first principles in a field and then testing how well these concepts and principles, plus some relevant data, could account for individual cases. At that time many Athenian scholars – commonly known as ‘the sophists’ (‘the wise’) – had been making major advances in the natural and social sciences by following such a method, working to formalize each field as a ‘science’ (logos). Plato, too, took up this task, and one of the areas on which he focused was the logos of ‘last things’ (eschata). Except for a shared interest in aesthetics, ethics and religion, the Socrates that Kierkegaard portrays in his dissertation differs from Plato at nearly every point. Instead of restricting the discussions to ‘the wise’ and their specialized topics, Kierkegaard’s Socrates indiscriminately welcomes everyone to join his ‘conversations’ (Samtaler); ‘he conversed equally well with tanners, tailors, Sophists, politicians, poets, with young and old, conversed equally well with them about everything.’19 Socrates shows so little interest in defining ethical, religious and aesthetic concepts and principles abstractly that he sometimes ignores that he and his interlocutors have reached a conclusion, continues the conversation and finally ends with no conclusion at all. Even while on trial for his life in Athens, he defends himself from suspicions that he is a dangerous sophist by arguing ironically that, if he were any sort of sophist, he would be appealing to those first principles sophists are so eager to find, but he does not. That he is totally ‘ignorant’20 of such abstractions21 just corroborates that he is one of the ‘simple’ (eenfoldige) rather than one of the ‘wise’.

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Søren Kierkegaard, ed. Poul Houe, Gordon D. Marino and Sven Hakon Rossel (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 63–75 [64]. CUP, 172 / SKS 7, 159. CUP, 173 / SKS 7, 160. CUP, 175 / SKS 7, 162. CI, 37–41 / SKS 1, 99–102. CI, 181 / SKS 1, 228. Plato, Apology 23D. Cf. David D. Possen, ‘Protagoras and Republic: Kierkegaard on Socratic Irony ’, in Kierkegaard and the Greek World: Tome I: Socrates and Plato, ed. Jon Stewart and Katalin Nun, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 2: tome I (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 87–104 [93].

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Accordingly, when Kierkegaard’s dissertation turns to Plato’s Phaedo and discusses the topic of the afterlife, his Socrates has only a very perfunctory interest in proofs of the immortality of the soul. Instead, Socrates appeals directly to his religious experience, remarking that just as he has met good gods during his life on earth, he expects to meet ‘other gods who are also good’ in the afterlife;22 and when, at his deathbed, his distraught followers beg him to provide them with Platonic-style proofs of immortality, he merely jokes with them about the approaching annihilation he will have if ‘nothing remains for the dead’.23 At the same time that Kierkegaard presents this attractive picture of Socrates’ courage in the face of death, he does not neglect to point out major differences between the Socratic and the Christian views on the afterlife – for example, that ‘that which is to be died to is sin, as a realm that all too convincingly proclaims its validity to everyone who languishes under its laws’,24 and the resurrection of the body.25 Kierkegaard also responds to Socrates’ conviction that if Socrates were to enter the afterlife and meet other gods, he could still not be sure they would be good gods as were the gods he had prayed to before; whereas, upon entering the afterlife, monotheists would be welcomed by the same god they had known during their earthly life. ‘Not until one recognizes that it is the same god who has led one by the hand through life and in the moment of death lets go, as it were, in order to open his arms and receive in them the yearning soul’, he argues, ‘not until then is the demonstration fully developed in conceptual form.’26 Kierkegaard even offers a tiny sketch of his view of the Christian afterlife: ‘According to the Christian view,’ he writes, ‘the moment of death is the last struggle between day and night; death, as is so beautifully expressed in the Church, is birth. In other words, the Christian does not dwell upon the struggle, the doubt, the pain, the negative, but rejoices in the victory, the certitude, the blessedness, the positive.’27 What is intriguing is to find here, already encapsulated in Kierkegaard’s first major work, a hint of Kierkegaard’s mature eschatology as it would be represented in his writings much later, during the period from 1848 to 1851.

II. IMMORTALITY AS GIFT AND AS TASK IN KIERKEGAARD’S EARLY DISCOURSES, 1843–4 A sense of eschatological ‘expectancy’ pervades the eighteen upbuilding discourses Kierkegaard published between 1843 and 1844, especially the first discourse of 1843, which is on the theme ‘The Expectancy of Faith’.28 Since it is a discourse for New Year’s Day, the discourse begins by asking what the greatest gift is that one could wish for someone on this day, and it soon decides that the most precious greatest gift would be

22 23 24

25 26

27 28

CI, 67 / SKS 1, 126 / Phaedo 63C. CI, 79 / SKS 1, 137. CI, 76 / SKS 1, 135. For a discussion of the important concept of ‘dying to’ (afdøe) in Kierkegaard’s later writings see Adam Buben, ‘Dying To/Renunciation’, in Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Tome II: Classicism to Enthusiasm, ed. Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15: tome II (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 213–18. CI, 69 / SKS 1, 129. CI, 67n. / SKS 1, 126. Cf. Marks, ‘Afterlife’, 276. This is almost exactly the same sentence as occurs at the end of the first upbuilding discourse of 1843. EUD, 29 / SKS 5, 37. CI, 77 / SKS 1, 135. EUD, 8–29 / SKS 5, 15–37.

428

428

T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

faith, and especially faith’s expectancy for the future.29 As the discourse continues, it becomes more and more confident, even jubilant. ‘What is the expectancy of faith?’ it asks. ‘Victory – or, as Scripture so earnestly and movingly teaches us, that all things must serve for good those who love God.’30 Finally, Kierkegaard prays that our souls in our final hour . . . will then be carried away from this world, as it were . . . to that place where we shall comprehend its full meaning, just as it is the same God who, after having led us by his hand through the world, draws back his hand and opens his arms to receive in them the yearning soul. Amen!31 These upbuilding discourses are without question the place to look for Kierkegaard’s views on immortality within his early writings, and their approach makes them perfect vehicles for that purpose. Each of them is a short, sermonic meditation, suitable for reading to oneself, preferably aloud. They came out in six booklets, with the three booklets of 1843 containing two, then three and then four discourses apiece, and the three booklets of 1844 continue the same two-three-four pattern. Although these booklets were short and unassuming, especially compared to the dissertation and the massive two-volume book Either/Or that preceded them, they quickly found a devoted readership. In fact, these discourses not only take up the topic of immortality but draw upon it as an essential part of their overall structural development. For example, the biblical text for the third and fourth discourses set an apocalyptic theme for the discourses from 1843, and the ninth and tenth do the same for 1844. Moreover, two central figures in the discourses, Anna the prophet and Paul the apostle, represent Kierkegaard’s alternative models of immortality: Anna, immorality as gift, and Paul, immortality as infinite task. Without taking hold of this double thread and following it through each successive booklet of discourses, it may be hard to detect this path among those many other paths that the collection of 1843–4 discourses is taking.

Immortality as Gift Despite the eschatological backdrop Kierkegaard sets for the 1843 discourses, by drawing upon 1 Pet. 4.7-12 for the biblical text of the third and fourth discourses,32 Kierkegaard in these discourses, as well as the Apostle Peter, in his letter, both place all the stress on expectancy for divine love and mercy, rather than on death and destruction. The part of the text Kierkegaard focuses on in these two discourses is v. 8, ‘love shall cover a multitude of sins’, which he associates with Jn 8.1-11, on ‘the woman who was a sinner’. She did not seek the ‘world’s judgment’ but ‘love’s judgment’,33 Kierkegaard notes; she simply wept at Jesus’s feet. ‘Then love discovered what the world concealed – the love in her; and since it had not been victorious in her, the Savior’s love . . . made the love in her even more powerful to hide a multitude of sins’.34 A more powerful image of divine mercy is hard to imagine.

29 30 31

32 33 34

EUD, 9–10 / SKS 5, 19–20. EUD, 19 / SKS 5, 28–9. Cf. Rom. 8.28. EUD, 28–9 / SKS 5, 37. This last phrase, beginning with ‘just as it is the same God’, is of course the same one Kierkegaard’s dissertation uses in critiquing Socrates’ polytheistic viewpoint in Phaedo 63C. 1 Pet. 5.12. EUD, 76 / SKS 5, 85. EUD, 77 / SKS 5, 86.

429

ESCHATOLOGY

429

From divine love as mercy Kierkegaard later turns, in discourses seven and eight, to divine love as grace, drawing from one of Kierkegaard’s favourite texts, ‘Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.’35 Since ‘the only good and perfect gift a human being can give is love’,36 and since love ‘comes down from above’, he argues, all love is ultimately divine love. Moreover, since divine love has a certain anonymity (it showers upon the good and the evil alike), human love should too. This means that ‘the right hand you stretched out to give will quickly hide itself, and the left hand will never find out anything . . . and both of you rejoice over the same thing, that the gift came from above, since there really was an invisible hand that gave it’.37 God’s love is given freely. It is gratis. It is sheer grace. This is also the standard of love to which these upbuilding discourses, as well as Kierkegaard’s other upbuilding writings, hold their readers, too. After the two discourse pairs that fastened on divine mercy and divine grace, discourses nine and ten take up the human response of patience with expectancy. This time, however, he chooses an eschatological biblical text for these two discourses that is disquieting, rather than comforting, and that text helps set the tone for all the 1844 discourses that follow. The verse is from the synoptic apocalypse: ‘In your patience you will gain your souls.’38 What could be more terrifying, asks the tenth discourse, what could create more fundamental anxiety, than the danger of losing one’s own soul? Yet, the discourse adds, even that may be overcome with patience, or perhaps more precisely, endurance.39 Finally, in the eleventh discourse, ‘Patience in Expectancy’, Kierkegaard introduces Anna the prophet, the prototype for the kind of human acceptance of God’s gifts that is appropriate for God’s gift of immortality. For many years she has been patiently waiting in the temple night and day, with fasting and prayer, praying for the redemption of Jerusalem.40 In this discourse, Kierkegaard does not focus upon what she is patient for, important as that is, as much as how she is patient, since in that way she may teach everyone how to be patient for eternal life as well. But you, my listener, you have not placed your expectancy in what is deceitful . . . You are expecting the resurrection of the dead, of both the righteous and the unrighteous; you are expecting a blessed reunion with those whom death took away from you . . . you are expecting that your life will become . . . clear to you, your estate in blessed understanding with your God and with yourself.41 Just as with Anna and the redemption of Jerusalem, so also with the person waiting for the resurrection of the living and the dead, the outcome is certain, because God’s promises are sure. All Anna can do, and needs to do, is to wait and pray expectantly; and it is the same with anyone waiting for the resurrection. God’s mercy is overflowing, and God’s gifts are free. What Anna does is exemplary and extraordinary, but, as Kierkegaard presents her accomplishment, all the emphasis is on what God does, not what Anna has to do.

35 36 37 38 39

40 41

EUD, 124–39 and 141–75 / SKS 5, 129–42 and 143–58. Cf. Jas 1.17. EUD, 157 / SKS 5, 157. EUD, 148 / SKS 5, 149. Lk. 21.19. This is also the text for the last discourse of 1843. EUD, 187–203 / SKS 5, 190–205. Whereas the Danish edition he is using translates the Greek word huponome in Lk. 21.19 with Taalmodighed (patience), Kierkegaard also feels free to use the term in a much more active sense than that, often with the connotations of ‘endurance’, ‘perseverance’ or even ‘courage’. Cf. SKSK 5, p. 170, and EUD, 515, note 336 (Howard V. Hong). EUD, 208 / SKS 5, 209 / Lk. 2.36-9. EUD, 216 / SKS 5, 215–16.

430

430

T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

Immortality as Task The fifth upbuilding discourse, ‘Strengthened in the Inner Being’, is the first discourse on the Apostle Paul.42 Kierkegaard emphasizes the sufferings he has had to undergo to fulfill the task he had been assigned by Christ: ‘afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, tumults, labors, watching, hunger’43 and the like. Although ‘nobody can provide this strengthening for himself ’ and ‘the witness itself is a gift from God, from whom comes every good and perfect gift’,44 the emphasis in Paul’s discourse is much more on the task than on the gift. The second discourse on Paul, ‘The Expectancy of an Eternal Salvation’, sets the standard for fulfilling the task much higher than before. If you were deciding where to move and settle permanently in a remote land, he writes, would you not pick someone to guide your decision who was a trustworthy and longstanding citizen of that country, who loved it above all others and was intimately acquainted with its distinctive customs?45 Paul is just such a citizen of heaven and is therefore a reliable guide for the afterlife. He has ‘the expectancy of an eternal salvation’, and ‘if a person sustains that expectancy in his soul, he has a goal [Maal] that is always valid, a criterion [Maalestok]’ that ‘is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure’.46 Still, despite this rigorous criterion, the discourse ends with the reassurance that ‘every person has heaven’s salvation only by the grace and mercy of God’.47 The third discourse on Paul thrusts him into faith’s ultimate struggle with the terrifying prospect of ‘the thorn in the flesh’48 – that is, of abandonment by God. Kierkegaard writes, It is hard enough for a person to experience the faithlessness of men, but to experience that there is a change in God, a shadow of variation, that there is an angel of Satan that has the power to tear a person out of this beatitude! Where, then, is there security for a human being if it is not even in the third heaven!49 Nonetheless, Paul sees the crisis as ‘beneficial to him’50 and the angel of Satan as an ‘emissary of God’. The demands of the infinite task with which he is entrusted leave him feeling as if God is dealing with him ‘as the hunter deals with game: he chases it weary, then he gives it a little time to catch its breath and gather its strength, and then the chase begins anew’.51 Like all the other 1843–4 upbuilding discourses, however, the underlying message that comes through is not despair but comfort, patience and courage. ‘If only a person is really aware of the dangerousness, he is already on the way to begin the good fight. The comfort will come, and one must not grasp it too early.’52

42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Cf. Andrew J. Burgess, ‘The Apostle Paul in the Strategic Humor of Kierkegaard’s 1843–44 Discourses’, in At være sig selv nærværende. Festskrift til Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, ed. Joakim Garff, Ettore Rocca and Pia Søltoft (Copenhagen: Kristeligt Dagblads Forlag, 2010), 462–75. 2 Cor. 6.4-5. EUD, 98 / SKS 5, 98. Italics in original. EUD, 254–8 / SKS 5, 251–4. EUD, 260–1 / SKS 5, 257. Cf. 2 Cor. 4.17. EUD, 271 / SKS 5, 266. EUD, 327–46 / SKS 5, 317–44. Cf. 2 Cor. 12.7. EUD, 337 / SKS 5, 326. EUD, 337 / SKS 5, 326. EUD, 344 / SKS 5, 332. EUD, 346 / SKS 5, 334.

431

ESCHATOLOGY

431

The strength of these 1843–4 discourses is that, in a powerful way, they present two sides of God’s relation to human beings – divine love and divine judgement – and that human beings should therefore hold ‘bold confidence’ (Frimodighed) both in ‘the judgment’ and in ‘God’s mercy’ in the afterlife.53 Moreover, these two sides are interconnected. In this last discourse of 1844, the same divine love that God displays in showing mercy to human beings becomes the ultimate criterion by which God judges whether each of them has shown such love to the neighbor. Nonetheless, Kierkegaard writes, ‘if no human being is capable of acquitting himself [in the judgement], he is capable of one thing – of indicting himself so terribly that he cannot acquit himself but learns to need mercy’.54

Are These Discourses Christian? As the basis for a Christian dogmatics, however, these discourses have severe limitations. As one commentator remarks, ‘If, to be labeled Christian, a discourse must explicitly discuss faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the God-man who by his death redeemed us from sin and offers himself as the way to eternal salvation, then the discourses are not Christian.’55 Nor does Kierkegaard claim that they are Christian. In fact, by his exacting standards, the first work he writes that he is willing to label ‘Christian’ is the third part of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, three years later. To understand why he does this, one must examine the contemporary Danish church situation, in which virtually everyone received Christian training and participated in Christian ceremonies, even though they are only nominal members of that faith. Several of Kierkegaard’s early pseudonyms seem to fit that description, such as Judge William in Either/Or II. He firmly accepts immortality of the soul,56 but he shows a limited understanding of the distinctively Christian view. Johannes de Silentio also seems to accept the teaching of immortality, although not the Christian afterlife.57 From a homiletical standpoint Kierkegaard’s strategy in the 1843–4 upbuilding discourses makes good sense, even though it may be problematic from a dogmatic standpoint. Nominal Christians hear authentic Christian messages carried by representatives such as Job, Paul, ‘the woman who was a sinner’, Anna the prophet and John the Baptist, rather than through the more usual approach of which they have grown tired; and they are reassured by Kierkegaard’s use of generic terminology such as ‘immortality’ in place of the specifically Jewish and Christian term ‘resurrection’. For their part, committed Christian readers can fill in the missing elements by their general familiarity with the material. Both groups are glad to hear a fresh approach. Both, too, might welcome the emphasis on the importance of immortality for the present life, although for different reasons – the nominal Christians, because they are uninterested in the afterlife, and the committed Christians because they may feel that too many Christians only think of the afterlife abstractly. For an adequate presentation of some key aspects of Christian eschatology, however, the reader must wait for Kierkegaard’s later writings, starting with

53 54 55

56 57

EUD, 340 / SKS 5, 328. EUD, 340 / SKS 5, 328. Thomas C. Anderson, ‘Is the Religion of Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses Religiousness A?’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2003), 51–75 [73]. EO2, 270 / SKS 4, 257. John Davenport, ‘Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling’, in Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard, ed. Edward F. Mooney (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 196–233.

432

432

T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

Postscript in 1846, especially the intimate discourses Kierkegaard wrote for, and in three cases actually preached to, the faithful gathered for Communion at the Church of Our Lady at 9.00 am on Friday mornings.

III. THE CHRISTIAN AFTERLIFE IN KIERKEGAARD’S LATE WRITINGS, 1846–55 As with some other theological areas, Concluding Unscientific Postscript marks a turning point in Kierkegaard’s eschatology leading to his late writings. With respect to format, Kierkegaard begins, after Postscript, to make a traditionally Lutheran division between those writings that mainly present immortality (or resurrection) as task from those that present it mainly as gift; and he associates the ‘task’ writings with the category of law and the ‘gift’ writings with the category of gospel. With respect to its content, Postscript strongly emphasizes the difficulty of the Christian concept of resurrection, and it groups Christian resurrection along with three other difficult concepts – Christ, Gospel and grace as central to the Christian faith – and it specifies that what makes these four concepts stand out is their absolute difficulty.

Postscript and the Absolute Difficulty of the Concept of Christian Resurrection Why is resurrection a more difficult concept than immortality? Postscript initially raises this issue using the examples of two defenders of immortality, Møller and Socrates. Møller, Climacus writes, was the one who exemplified, in his life as much as in his treatise, that immortality is a ‘subjective’ problem – that is, not an objective problem about human immortality in general, but a problem for him personally, and also for everyone else, in the same personal way.58 For Møller, the death of his wife Betty was what brought that home to him. For Socrates, too, the question whether he is immortal is personal; ‘he dares to die, and with the passion of the infinite he has so ordered his whole life that it might be acceptable – if there is an immortality.’59 Yet that is not enough for Climacus. ‘To struggle through life, existing, on the basis of the “if ” of immortality might seem arduous enough,’ he writes, ‘and to obtain a demonstration of a resurrection an enormous relief – if the demonstration were not the most difficult of all.’60 Yet what can be so difficult about conceptualizing a resurrection that is even more formidable than the issues Socrates faced? Moreover, why is it that, as Climacus writes earlier in the same paragraph, someone would have to ‘venture against the understanding’ to believe in a resurrection? Although Climacus does not specify the nature of this difficulty at this point, he does supply one valuable clue, that ‘the difficulty is absolute, not comparative dialectical (easier for one person than for another) . . . because in the sphere of the religious there are no unjustly treated individualities’.61 Therefore, the particular difficulty he is speaking of cannot be a historical difficulty, since then resolving the difficulty would be easier for historians than non-historians, nor can it be specific to the field of philosophy or to any other field that depends upon its own set of academic experts.

58 59 60 61

CUP, 172–3 / SKS 7, 160. CUP, 201 / SKS 7, 185. CUP, 429 / SKS 7, 391. CUP, 430–1 / SKS 7, 392. That is, in Kierkegaard’s terminology, it is a ‘simple’ difficulty.

433

ESCHATOLOGY

433

Although Climacus does not say at any point exactly what this essential difficulty is, he does lay out in detail, requiring hundreds of pages, three preliminary challenges that will be more than enough for any of his readers: complete renunciation of the popular ways of conceiving human existence, moral suffering at one’s utter failure to do this and a concomitant acknowledgement of total guilt.62 Not until The Gospel of Sufferings (1847), the first book Kierkegaard is willing to label as ‘Christian’, does he name the difficulty: ‘following after Christ’ (Efterfølgelse Christi).63 Christ is the human ‘prototype’ all are to follow,64 the Maalestok that the thirteenth upbuilding discourse neglected to name specifically. The absolute difficulty is thus the same infinite task Paul is faced with in the 1843 upbuilding discourse on the ‘thorn in the flesh’; but because that task is infinite, and the difficulty absolute, there is, of course, no way he can accomplish it without divine grace. The following year, in 1848, the discourse in Christian Discourses on the biblical text ‘There Will a Resurrection of the Dead, of the Righteous – and of the Unrighteous’65 draws the logical conclusion from Climacus’s analysis, by proclaiming that immortality – in the distinctively Christian sense – is judgement. ‘Immortality is not a continued life, a continued life as such in perpetuity’, he writes, ‘but immortality is the eternal separation between the righteous and the unrighteous; immortality is no continuation that results as a matter of course but a separation that results from the past.’66 By isolating the text’s last clause – ‘and of the unrighteous’ – Kierkegaard highlights that Christian ‘immortality is no continuation that results as a matter of course’, and, by including the possibility of eternal damnation, he shows that it differs radically from the views offered by Plato or Møller. Judged by the absolute standard, no one is righteous except for Christ. Therefore, Kierkegaard insists, about immortality in this sense: ‘Fear it, it is only too certain; do not doubt whether you are immortal – tremble, because you are immortal.’67 During the rest of his life Kierkegaard continues to work out the implications of this conception of immortality and resurrection, both for his authorship and for his own relationship with Christ.

Kierkegaard’s Views on Some Open Questions about the Afterlife Although Kierkegaard is not prone to speculation for its own sake, his writings do occasionally suggest answers to some traditional questions in eschatology that have definite implications for Christian practice. Three of these questions are as follows: What is eternal judgement? What is eternal happiness? Who will be saved? What is eternal judgement? Kierkegaard writes about eternal judgement in two different senses. On the one hand, it is ‘Judgement Day’ (Dommedag), when the world will come to an end; and in the second, it is the individual accounting (Regnskab) each person will receive at the end of one’s life. The former, along with the popular fever for

62 63

64 65 66 67

CUP, 387–555 / SKS 7, 352–504. ‘Discipleship’ is the usual English translation of the Danish word Efterfølgelse. That Dietrich Bonhoeffer uses the German cognate of Efterfølgelse (Nachfolge) is an example of the close ties between these two Christian thinkers. PC, 238–45 / SKS 12, 232–9. CD, 202–13 / SKS 10, 211–21. Cf. Acts 24.15. CD, 205 / SKS 10, 214. CD, 203 / SKS 10, 212.

434

434

T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

millennialism and apocalyptic movements, he rejects as a dangerous distraction. Even when the European political world gets violent in 1848, and the air is filled with news about wars and rumours of wars, Kierkegaard does not shift that stance. Paradoxically, he argues, the best way to take a care for tomorrow is to turn one’s back to it and to focus on the tasks for today. He uses the familiar image of someone rowing a boat with one’s back to the destination: ‘when, in order to work toward the goal (eternity) properly, he turns his back, he does not see the next day at all, whereas with the help of the eternal he sees today and its tasks with perfect clarity.’68 On the other hand, ‘judgement’ means also one’s own judgement day, when one dies and must make an ‘accounting’ for all the righteous and unrighteous acts one has ever done. In fact, there will be no need to make sure that your accounting is complete, since an accurate record has been kept all along. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard compares the situation to that of a murderer fleeing by train, not knowing that an indisputably accurate account of his crime has been telegraphed ahead to his destination, even before the person knows it has been prepared.69 Unlike Judgement Day, this final ‘accounting’ should be of urgent concern for everyone to keep in mind every day. ‘The point is,’ Kierkegaard writes, ‘you are not to do this [accounting] first in eternity; you will be judged in eternity as to whether in your earthly life you have done this as eternity wants to have it done.’70 What is eternal happiness? While Kierkegaard sometimes writes in his journals about his personal hopes for life in heaven, the best sources for his view are, as one might expect, in his discourses, and especially in the ‘communion discourses’ he wrote during 1848–51. In general, he seems to expect that he and all who are saved will live in a state similar to the angels, but with recollections of an earthly past. When Kierkegaard lay on his deathbed, for example, he told his boyhood friend, Emil Boesen, that he had ‘had the feeling of becoming an angel, of getting wings’, straddling a cloud and singing Hallelujahs.71 Blessed recollections of his life on earth are one of Kierkegaard’s most frequently mentioned hopes for his life in heaven. He writes, ‘God be praised, there will be time in eternity to think every thought through.’72 This is especially true of recollections of former sufferings. Recollections in the afterlife may arise either from ‘undisturbed enjoyment of all the good things’ or else from sufferings, especially the sufferings of the poor. The recollection of situations of enjoyment, on the one hand, ‘is pleasant at the moment but . . . does not . . . exist at all for eternal recollecting. On the other hand, there is no recollecting more blessed . . . than sufferings over and done with in company with God’.73 This theme recurs in many of Kierkegaard’s writings, all the way to the end of the authorship,74 and it is easily understandable in view of his extreme physical suffering and isolation toward the end of his life. 68 69 70

71

72

73 74

CD, 73 / SKS 10, 82. SUD, 124 / SKS 11, 125. CD, 207 / SKS 10, 216. Cf. Patrick Stokes, The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Self-Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 199–202. Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, ed. and trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse and Virginia Laursen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 125. JP 6:6152, p. 7 / SKP IX A 42. Cf. Gregor Malantschuk, ‘The “Most Difficult Issues”’, in Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2003), 187–225 [203]. CD, 104 / SKS 10, 115–6. PV, 96–7 / SKS 16, 75–6. Cf. TM, 297 / SKS 13, 355–6; TM, 298–300 / SKS 13, 357–9; CD, 293–4 / SKS 10, 267.

435

ESCHATOLOGY

435

By far the fullest account of eternal happiness, however, comes in the ‘communion discourses’ and the other ‘gift/gospel’ writings of 1847–51 within Kierkegaard’s later authorship.75 These writings are the primary locus for the paradigm of Christ as the freely given gift, which matches the paradigm of Christ as the one who sets the infinite task. In the first discourse in ‘The Gospel of Sufferings’ (Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Part Three), for example, Kierkegaard emphasizes that the joy in the sufferings of discipleship is a joy in the future life. ‘Christ went ahead,’ he writes, ‘in order to prepare a place for the follower.’76 Without this joy, all would be lost for the follower. As Paul writes, ‘If we hope only for this life, we are the most miserable of all.’77 ‘The joy of it,’78 however, ‘is that the happiness of eternity still outweighs even the heaviest temporal suffering.’79 In the first discourse in ‘States of Mind in the Strife of Suffering’ (Christian Discourses, Part Two), he argues that just as time is nothing compared to eternity, in eternity it will be as if temporal sufferings never happened: ‘Every tear shall be wiped away from the eyes that now shine with joy; every need will be satisfied in the heart that now possesses everything and possesses it there.’80 The communion discourses are short (about five to fifteen minutes long when read aloud81), but the eschatological passages sometimes often come at the end of the discourse, where they have special rhetorical force. For example, Now you go to the Communion table, the bread handed to you and then the wine, his holy body and blood, once again as a holy pledge that by his sufferings and death he did put himself also in your place, so that you, the judgement past, may enter into life, where once again he has prepared a place for you.82 Who will be saved? In the ‘judgement discourse’ in Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard answers this question in a highly personal way. ‘For me,’ he writes, ‘nothing has ever crossed my mind but that every other person would easily be saved; in my view it was doubtful only in regard to me.’83 Both of these clauses deserve separate attention.

75

76 77 78

79 80 81

82 83

The pairings are as follows: LAW

GOSPEL

UDVS, Part One CD, Part One CD, Part Three SUD PC FSE

UDVS, Part Two CD, Part Two CD, Part Four Three Discourses at Communion on Fridays (WA) An Upbuilding Discourse (WA) Two Discourses at Communion on Fridays (WA)

WL is omitted from this chart because it is too complex to classify in this way. UDVS, 227 / SKS 8, 328. Italics in original. UDVS, 228 / SKS 8, 329. 1 Cor. 15.19. The editors of UDVS, Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, placed the phrase ‘The joy of it’ before the titles of most of the discourses in this book. The result is appropriate, since the book is at least as much about joy as about sufferings. UDVS, 306 / SKS 8, 399. Cf. 2 Cor. 4.17. CD, 101 / SKS 10, 113. Cf. Rev. 7.17, 21.4. Niels-Jørgen Cappelørn, ‘Søren Kierkegaard at Friday Communion in the Church of Our Lady ’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Without Authority, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2006), 255–94 [277]. WA, 124 / SKS 11, 259; Cf. CD, 274 / SKS 10, 292. CD, 209–10 / SKS 10, 218. Italics in original.

436

436

T&T CLARK COMPANION TO THE THEOLOGY OF KIERKEGAARD

The first clause deals more with other persons than himself. On the question of whether other persons are saved, he feels confident: ‘nothing has ever crossed my mind but that every other person would easily be saved.’ These words come right after his claim that everyone else is sure to go heaven, but he is not. Here Kierkegaard is in fact merely acknowledging that he, as a sinner, is in no position to judge anyone else’s fitness for God’s mercy. His own sinfulness clouds his judgement: ‘an impenetrable darkness covers who is the righteous one and who is the unrighteous.’84 That is why he must avoid judging others. Moreover, just as God has shown such great love through Christ, he, like every other Christian, has a positive duty to cover over the ‘multitude of sins’ of all those they meet, by finding a mitigating explanation for the sin, keeping silent about it or, best of all, blotting it out entirely with forgiveness.85 Thus, both from a negative and a positive standpoint, Kierkegaard finds that he is obliged to treat everyone else as saved. The second clause, in which Kierkegaard speaks of his own situation rather than that of other people, gives a very different kind of answer from before; he writes, ‘in my view it [i.e. salvation] was doubtful only to me.’ That he is ‘doubtful’ implies a certain ambiguity in his attitude. On the one hand, his own sins are obvious to him,86 and he is totally guilty. His duty is surely not to look around for ‘mitigating explanations’ but to beg God for forgiveness. Rationalization comes all too easily. Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses often refer to a universal human tendency they call ‘the understanding’ (Forstanden), which slyly suggests plausible excuses to the sinner. This tendency, rather than any abstruse philosophical or historical issue, is the ultimate reason the sinner needs a ‘crucifixion of the understanding’.87 On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s own salvation, far from being obvious to him, is a constant source of his astonishment and deep gratitude. That the Lord of the universe should suffer and die for sinners like him is an idea he could never have come up with on his own. It is, as he repeats in one book after another, a thought ‘that could never have arisen in the human heart’.88 God’s grace is amazing, and the sinner ought never to take it for granted. Whereas in Reformation times Martin Luther saw his primary task as a preacher to keep the anguished conscience from falling into utter despair, Kierkegaard feels that nineteenth-century Copenhagen parishioners are much more likely to suffer from complacency than despair. ‘The true, the essential expression of its being by grace is the very fear and trembling of unsureness. There lies faith – as far, just as far, from despair as from sureness.’89 This is the sense of ‘faith’ in which Kierkegaard here resolves to remain ‘doubtful’ of his own salvation. In December 1854, Kierkegaard sums up the answer in his main writings to the question of who he believed would be saved, in terms of his life’s mission to the people of Denmark:

84 85 86

87

88 89

CD, 207 / SKS 10, 217. ‘Love Hides a Multitude of Sins’, WL, 280–99 / SKS 9, 278–97. This is a theme that appears all the way through Kierkegaard’s authorship, even in his dissertation; e.g. CI, 76 / SKS 1, 135: sin is ‘a realm that all too convincingly proclaims its validity to everyone who languishes under its laws’. Cf. CUP, 564 / SKS 7, 513. Cf. Andrew J. Burgess, ‘Forstand in the Swenson-Lowrie Correspondence and in the “Metaphysical Caprice”’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1994), 109–28 [124]. EUD, 263 / SKS 5, 259; PF, 109 / SKS 4, 305; CUP, 580 / SKS 7, 528; PC, 51 / SKS 12, 64. CD, 211 / SKS 10, 219. Italics in original.

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I want some truth here and want it said honestly, loudly, and clearly. But I do not pretend to be better than others. Therefore, what the old Bishop once said to me is not true – namely, that I spoke as if the others were going to hell. No, if I can be said to speak at all of going to hell then I say something like this: If the others are going to hell, then I am going with them. But I do not believe that; on the contrary, I believe that we will all be saved, I, too, and this awakens my deepest wonder.90 This statement offers no dogmatic pronouncement, however, and it is based on no theory of universal salvation. By making it Kierkegaard merely acknowledges his total unfitness for salvation (an awareness he could not have of anyone else’s situation), as well as his personal conviction that he has received God’s unfathomable grace. Anyone taking this answer and using it to support some view about the whole human race has misunderstood the question Kierkegaard is asking. In addition to his remarks about the possibility of human beings in general receiving salvation, Kierkegaard also occasionally brings up the case of those who lived before the birth of Christ or who, for some other reason, never had a chance to hear the Gospel about Christ. Chief among these figures, of course, is Socrates, who plays such a major role in Kierkegaard’s writings. Socrates is the one ‘that, humanly speaking, is unique in the world and that we usually place closest to Christianity’,91 Kierkegaard writes, and when he ranks all human beings according to how much he owes to them, he places Socrates even ahead of his father, and behind only Christ. In a key notebook entry during 1851, Kierkegaard writes that Christianity has replaced the former standard of human excellence with Christ as the human prototype, and this ‘true ideal reveals that everyone has need of grace, humbling everyone’.92 One implication of Kierkegaard’s statement is that Socrates and others like him who lived before Christ or who for some other reason have not heard the Gospel cannot be expected to meet a standard that did not yet exist for them. What can one say about Socrates, then? In The Point of View, Kierkegaard writes, enigmatically, ‘True, he was no Christian, that I know, although I also definitely remain convinced that he has become one.’93 That statement continues to tantalize Kierkegaard scholars.94 The more important question, however, is about the possible salvation of people living today who cannot hear about Christ, rather than about those long ago. In Postscript, for example, Climacus takes up the case of someone who is living ‘in an idolatrous land’. After comparing such a person ‘who prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol’, on the one hand, with someone ‘who lives in the midst of Christianity with knowledge of the true idea of God’ but ‘prays in untruth’, on the other, Climacus asks, ‘Where, then, is there more truth?’95 The answer is obvious: a merely nominal churchgoing Dane would be much further away from God than a truly pious idolater.

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JP 6:6947, p. 557 / SKP XI 3 B 57, p. 557. Cf. JP 6:6934, p. 550 / SKS 26, NB36:5, p. 414. CD, 241 / SKS 10, 248. KJN 8, p. 150 / JP 1:991, p. 432 / SKS 21, NB22:92, p. 154. PV, 54 / SKS 16, 36. Cf. Michael A. Cantrell, ‘Was Socrates a Christian before Christ? Kierkegaard and the Problem of Christian Uniqueness’, Faith and Philosophy 31, no. 2 (April 2014): 123–42. CUP, 201 / SKS 7, 184. Cf. George Connell, ‘Truth, Subjectivity, and the Parable of the Fervent Pagan’, in Kierkegaard and the Paradox of Religious Diversity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2016), 69–80.

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CONCLUSION If there is one word to sum up Kierkegaard’s eschatology, as well as that of Socrates, it is ‘simple’ (eenfoldig), in the special sense in which Kierkegaard uses that word, to mean equally easy for everyone. Kierkegaard’s Socrates is his primary model for what a simple approach should be. Disdaining the lecture circuits of the professional sophists, Socrates conversed with everyone he met and about topics that mattered to them all. For Socrates simplicity is a key philosophical principle that helps protect against unbridled speculation. ‘When Plato the poet daydreams and visualizes everything Socrates the dialectician was seeking’, as he does in Diotima’s story in Plato’s Symposium, Kierkegaard maintains that Plato’s philosophizing enters ‘the mythical’;96 and the more it does this the more it ‘departs from real thinking’.97 For Kierkegaard simplicity is also a theological principle, since ‘in the sphere of the religious there are no unjustly treated individualities’.98 That is why the Gospel should be preached so that it is equally difficult and equally easy for the learned and the unlearned, and the young and the old, alike. Of course, that is not possible for theological discussions for many reasons, but any theologian who, like Kierkegaard, is able to preach eschatology, while keeping so many intricate distinctions straight, surely deserves special commendation and emulation. Still, that any task may be equally difficult for everyone does not make it easy for anyone. On the contrary, some tasks that are equally difficult for anyone seem virtually impossible, once a person considers all that is involved in performing them. One such task is praying to God. As Climacus writes in Postscript, ‘To pray is, of course, a very simple matter; one would think it would be as easy as buttoning one’s trousers . . . And yet how difficult! Intellectually, I must have a clear conception of God, of myself, and of my relationship to him, and of the dialectic of the relationship of prayer.’99 Kierkegaard knows the difficulty first-hand. For years he has been praying to God,100 and that spiritual practice, in good times and bad, is what Kierkegaard draws on a year or two after Postscript when he writes down the instructions for his burial marker.101 Now, as he contemplates the afterlife, his thoughts are not primarily on how it will look, what sort of body he will have or who else will be there, but simply, as he puts it, about talking eternally ‘with my Jesus’, just as he has been doing all along.

FURTHER READING Barrett, Lee C. ‘Immortality ’. In Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Tome III: Envy to Incognito, edited by Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald and Jon Stewart, 226–7. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 15: tome III. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Czakó, István. Geist und Unsterblichkeit: Grundprobleme der Religionsphilosophie und Eschatologie im Denken Søren Kierkegaards. Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 29. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015.

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CI, 108 / SKS 7, 161. CI, 107 / SKS 7, 160. CUP, 430–1 / SKS 7, 392. That is, in Kierkegaard’s terminology, it is a ‘simple’ difficulty. CUP, 162 / SKS 7, 150–1. Emanuel Skjoldager, ‘His Personal Prayers’, in Kierkegaard as a Person, ed. Niels Thulstrup and Marie Mikulová Thulstrup, Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 13 (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels, 1983), 156–61. SKSK 28, p. 42.

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Malantschuk, Gregor. ‘De “Vanskeligste Problemer ” ’. In Fra Individ til den Enkelte: Problemer omkring Friheden og det etiske hos Søren Kierkegaard. Copenhagen: Reitzels, 1978, 193–232. [‘The “Most Difficult Issues”’. In Kierkegaard’s Concept of Existence, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2003, 187–225.] Marks, Tamara Monet. ‘Kierkegaard’s “New Argument” for Immortality ’. Journal of Religious Ethics 38, no. 1 (2010): 143–86. Marks, Tamara Monet. ‘Kierkegaard’s Understanding of the Afterlife’. In Kierkegaard and Death, edited by Patrick Stokes and Adam J. Buben, 274–97. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Stokes, Patrick. ‘Survival and Eschatology ’. In The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 192–217.

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Theological Trajectories

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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Kierkegaard, Theology and the Academy STANLEY HAUERWAS

I. GETTING THE QUESTION RIGHT It is no accident that Christianity developed a scholarly theological tradition which over time found its way into the university. That is to put the matter in a misleading way. It is not that theology found its way into the university, but universities, particularly the universities at Paris and Oxford, were constituted by theologians at work. There were lively debates about what other disciplines might need to be included in the curriculum but the central role of theology was never questioned. It is a fascinating question why Christians have needed people who think they have to think about what being Christian means. I think the church needs theologians because she cannot hide from herself that she believes the One that moves the sun and the stars is to be found in the person of a first-century Jew named Jesus. To make such a claim, and even more to make your life turn and depend on it, as we say in the American South, requires a good deal of thought. And thought has to take place somewhere. For centuries monasticism was a good home for theology, but then along came the university. The university, of course, has changed over the years. One of the most important changes was called the Enlightenment. The university gave birth to the Enlightenment and became the primary agent of this movement. That it did so is not surprising given the Enlightenment desire to free humanity from all authority except reason alone. The transformation of the university by advocates of the Enlightenment meant that those who would have theology taught in the university bore the burden of proof. The strategies developed to legitimate theology as a university discipline meant, however, that theology in modernity was no longer an ecclesial discipline. At best theology became but another subject in the curriculums of the modern university. Theology so understood often becomes no more than a report about what Christians at one time believed. This is thought to be a useful task because students who may well be Christians lack a robust knowledge of the Christian tradition. Yet even a report on what Christians at one time believed can be quite controversial if the subject is not taught in a disinterested way. Religious convictions that have cost believers their lives are now presented in a fashion that will let students make up their own minds. So constituted it is quite difficult for students not to think theology is a matter of ‘opinion’. Many people who teach theology or some discipline such as biblical studies desperately try to avoid any suggestion that they are trying to indoctrinate students. Faculty who

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now comprise departments of religious studies have strong reasons not to be identified as theologians. Their methods are social scientific or historical because those methods are accepted by the university. Theology, on the other hand, is assumed not to pass muster. As a result, most students, even students at Christian colleges and universities, have little opportunity to take courses in theology. At least they have little opportunity to take courses in theology that are taught with the presumption that this course can and perhaps should change the life of the student. It is also the case that there are social and political presumptions that are challenged by courses in theology. Take, for example, the widespread presumption that in religious matters the distinction between the public and the private is a given. That distinction is often assumed to be crucial for sustaining liberal social orders that depend on relegating our strongest convictions to the alleged private realm. That presumption must be challenged if theology is taught well. When it is not challenged the student cannot help but conclude that theological convictions are not subject to questions of truth or falsity with the added implication that theological claims cannot be subjected to reason. I suspect Kierkegaard would have found these developments deeply ‘ironic’. He was, of course, a person of extraordinary intelligence, but he seemed to have no desire to be associated with the university. He wrote on his own authority. Moreover, he did not write to be read by other theologians. He wrote to change the world or at least the lives of those who read him. That he did so raises the interesting question of whether Kierkegaard could be taught in the current university ‘objectively’ because objectivity would require that the teacher makes clear that Kierkegaard is not someone you simply learn ‘about’. When read rightly, the reader experiences an encounter: Kierkegaard wants to change your life. That Kierkegaard wrote outside of the university does not mean he did not value the university.1 He not only went to the University of Copenhagen, but he seems to have been an exemplary student. Walter Lowrie, for example, observes that in his first years in the university Kierkegaard was extremely diligent not only because he thought to be so was his duty but also because ‘he rejoiced in the opportunity for broader culture which was there offered to him, or which the free life of a university student made possible’.2 Later Kierkegaard would study in Berlin, which at the time represented what most considered the zenith of academic culture. As a result, Kierkegaard was well versed in ancient and contemporary philosophy attending, for example, Schelling’s lectures on Hegel.3 In short, Kierkegaard could not have been the great critic of church and university if he had not received an education that only a university can provide. These meandering reflections about theology, the university and Kierkegaard – reflections that would demand acknowledgment that universities come in quite different shapes and sizes – are in the interest of trying to imagine what or how Kierkegaard might help us think about theology and the university. One way to put the matter is to ask if and how Kierkegaard could be taught in most universities. He was unapologetically Christian. He sought to reintroduce Christianity into Christendom. Can his works be taught with

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Paul Holmer observes that Kierkegaard had a high regard for the disciplines of history and the sciences. Moreover he was extremely well read in philosophy and theology. Though no doubt much of Kierkegaard’s intellectual development was the result of his self-education, it is still the case that that education was made possible by the university. See Paul L. Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, ed. David J. Gouwens and Lee C. Barrett III (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 79–108. Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 45. Lowrie, A Short Life, 119–20.

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the same seriousness with which he did his work? I will return to this question in the conclusion of this chapter. There is, of course, the question of whether the changed circumstances in which we live mean Kierkegaard’s work no longer has the relevance it did in his day. The university in Kierkegaard’s time was still a Christendom institution. That is no longer the case. Does that mean we no longer have anything to learn from Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom? I do not think that is true, but to say why will require attention to Kierkegaard’s understanding of Christendom and why he thought such an arrangement made it difficult to be a Christian. As I have already indicated, most contemporary universities no longer identify with their Christian past. That some still allow theology to be taught can be understood to be a ‘cultural lag’ that may not last much longer. Yet it is nonetheless the case that even though most contemporary research universities no longer identify with their Christian beginnings that does not mean they have ceased being agents of, to be sure, a very different ‘Christendom’. This is particularly the case given John Howard Yoder’s account of the mutations Constantinianism has assumed in recent time. For example, Yoder insightfully suggests that Constantinianism can assume a quite secular form just to the extent it is assumed that the movement of history has a singular secular purpose.4 These are clearly not theoretical issues for me. I am a declared lover of the university. In The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (2007) I was quite critical of universities for being such good servants of reigning economic and political interests.5 Yet in The State of the University I offered no account of the university that might be an alternative to the universities we now inhabit. I offered no alternative because I am unsure what such a university would look like. I also worry that a university that paraded its Christianity would find it difficult to maintain a radical perspective. How that might be done, that is, how Christians might reclaim the university as a servant of Christ, I hope to explore by attending to Kierkegaard’s attempt to introduce Christianity into Christendom. That I hope to find resources in Kierkegaard for thinking through how to think theologically about the university as well as how to do theology even in the university may seem quite odd. Kierkegaard could be quite devastating when he satirically depicts professors who write books about books. He also knew he was destined to be ‘a’ subject of study by professors who would write learned treatises on what he must have really meant by ‘a leap of faith’, or whether he had disavowed ‘reason’ or whether he was a philosopher or theologian.6 From Kierkegaard’s perspective, to try so to ‘place’ him betrays his attempt to help us see that the how of theology is as important as the what.7

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John Howard Yoder, The Original Revolution: Essays on Christian Pacifism (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 2003), 143–5. Stanley Hauerwas, The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). David Burrell gets it right in response to the suggestion that Kierkegaard is an irrationalist because he sought to edify. Burrell observes that Kierkegaard thought one can learn ‘to speak Christian with impeccable rigor’. What those who would make Kierkegaard an irrationalist fail to see, according to Burrell, is that Kierkegaard simply offers a different conception of what proper philosophic inquiry should look like. See David Burrell, Exercises in Religious Understanding (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016), 175. Burrell’s book was originally published in 1974. For an insightful account of the how of Kierkegaard’s ‘how’ see Holmer, On Kierkegaard and the Truth, 149–55.

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It is ironic, a category Kierkegaard loved, that Kierkegaard – the one person who had taken his task to be introducing Christianity into Christendom – has become the creature created by professors in the interest of making him just another theologian with a position. By attending to Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom I hope to recover why his theology should continue to challenge us. Yet I think the situation in which we find ourselves is quite different than the Christendom Kierkegaard confronted. He wanted to introduce Christianity, which turned out to be Jesus, back into Christendom. We no longer live in a robust Christendom like that of Kierkegaard’s Denmark, which may mean we need to rethink what it means to do theology in a manner that defies the attempt to defang what Christians say we believe. In order to try to get clear on these matters I need to remind us what Kierkegaard thought to be the problem he called ‘Christendom’. His ‘authorship’ was designed to create readers capable of being able to follow Christ in a world in which everyone assumed they were Christians. He wrote to create a ‘reader’. I will try, therefore, to describe his attack on Christendom without that description betraying his desire to make us ‘individuals’.

II. ON BEING A CHRISTIAN IN CHRISTENDOM Kierkegaard begins The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Report to History by explaining why he has written using different pseudonyms. He has done so, he confesses, because ‘Christendom is a prodigious illusion’ that cannot be challenged using direct communication.8 One cannot challenge an illusion using direct communication because direct communication presupposes the receiver’s ability to receive is in good order. But in Christendom the ability to receive has been lost because it is assumed that one is a Christian just as one is a Dane. The problem is deep because the illusion makes it impossible for the one under the illusion to recognize they are under an illusion. That is why one must first use a caustic means if one is to get a message past the illusion. According to Kierkegaard a caustic powerful enough to challenge the illusion will often take the form of a negative means in which the truth may appear the same as the deception.9 What is the illusion that forces Kierkegaard to use deceptive strategies in the hopes of creating ‘an individual’? It is the presumption by the citizens of Denmark that they are Christians because they live in a Christian country. What are we to make, Kierkegaard wonders, of the reality that thousands call themselves Christian yet they live in categories quite foreign to being a Christian? For example, Kierkegaard observes, there are people who never enter a church, people who take oaths in God’s name, people upon whom it has never dawned that they might have an obligation before God, nonetheless, they still consider themselves Christians. In a like manner there are people who are buried as

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Søren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 22. For a defence of The Point of View for My Work as an Author as representing Kierkegaard’s truthful understanding of his authorship, see Mark A. Tietjen, Kierkegaard, Communication, and Virtue: Authorship as Edification (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 61–88. Tietjen’s general perspective on Kierkegaard is one with which I am deeply sympathetic. In particular I think he is right to read Kierkegaard in the tradition of the virtues which puts him much closer to Alasdair MacIntyre than MacIntyre himself thinks. Tietjen’s readings of the pseudonymous literature as works of edification, I think, are also right. These matters have direct implications for the suggestions I will make concerning how Kierkegaard should be taught in the modern university. Kierkegaard, Point of View, trans. Lowrie, 40.

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Christians by the church, who are recognized as Christians by the state, who may even call themselves Christians although they may not believe in God’s existence. Given the conditions of Christendom these same people still consider themselves Christians.10 This illusion, moreover, is sustained by the assumption that eighteen centuries of Christianity are sufficient to confirm the truth of what Christians believe. Yet Kierkegaard counters that assumption arguing that those eighteen centuries have contributed not an iota of proof for sustaining the truth of Christianity. Indeed the opposite has been the case as those eighteen centuries have ‘contributed with steadily increasing power to do away with Christianity’.11 Kierkegaard does not deny that Christianity has rightly had an effect on the world. Christ’s name is proclaimed and believed throughout the world. The doctrines surrounding Christ have changed the face of the world permeating all relationships. Accordingly many assume that the history of the triumph of Christianity to take over the world is sufficient to establish that Jesus is who he says he was; namely, he was God. Kierkegaard responds to this claim with an emphatic, ‘No.’ History has not established who he is because history – and the effects of Christianity in history – cannot substantiate the claim that Jesus was God. At most, appeals to historical effects might show that Jesus was a great or good man. But faith in Jesus as the Son of God is of a different order.12 Any claim to the contrary is blasphemy. What must be acknowledged, Kierkegaard argues, is that from any human point of view Christianity is and must be a kind of madness. It is so because only through a consciousness of sin can one come to the One who can save. Accordingly, Christianity must display itself as madness ‘in order that the qualitative infinite emphasis may fall upon the fact that only consciousness of sin is the way of entrance’.13 Indeed, this is the kind of consciousness that is the exact opposite of the kind of awareness that Christendom sponsors, namely, the attitude which expresses admiration for Jesus. Such a form of consciousness is a fraud, a self-deceit, but one common to Christendom. It is so because in Christendom Christ is exalted to confirm our self-deceptions, the deepest deception being that we do not have to lose our lives to be true disciples of Jesus. What those shaped by Christendom cannot fathom is that there is an intrinsic connection between truth and martyrdom. The crowd is untruth and it was the crowd that crucified Christ. Although Jesus addressed himself to all he refused to have dealings 10 11

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Ibid., 22–3. Søren Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 143. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, trans. Lowrie, 28–9. In Philosophical Fragments Kierkegaard remarks, ‘If . . . God does not exist it would of course be impossible to prove it; and if he does exist it would be folly to attempt it.’ Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, trans. David F. Swenson and Howard V. Hong, introduction and commentary by Niels Thulstrup (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936, 1962), 49. In many ways that sums up the case I was trying to make in my Gifford Lectures now published as With the Grain of the Universe: The Church’s Witness and Natural Theology (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2001). Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, trans. Lowrie, 72. For an incisive account of Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin see Jason A. Mahn, Fortunate Fallibility: Kierkegaard and the Power of Sin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Mahn interprets Kierkegaard’s understanding of sin as being in the tradition of the ‘fortunate Fall’. Mahn’s interpretation stems from Kierkegaard’s persistent attempt to see grace through the fractures of human fallibility. See Mahn, Fortunate Fallibility, 2. Mahn also makes the extremely important point that when Kierkegaard inscribed his account of sin within his account of human nature he also enfolds that anthropology within his portrayal of Christ’s particularity. Ibid., 14. Christendom’s resistance to such particularity results in sin being something from which we can assume we have already been saved and therefore no confession or repentance is required.

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with the crowd as a crowd. He was not trying to win a popularity contest or be elected messiah. He would be what he is, the Truth, which is the condition necessary to produce that strangest of all characters in Kierkegaard, that is, the individual. That character is to be found among those who recognize that the hard truth, a truth that cannot be acknowledged by the crowd, is that ‘every-one who truly would serve the truth is eo ipso, in one way or another, a martyr’.14 What Christendom occludes, or, even more troubling, what Christendom loses, is Jesus. The reason it is so difficult to be a Christian in Christendom is that one cannot help but think being Christian is to identify with the 1,800 years of the effects of Christianity rather than with this Jesus who is the Christ. But when Christianity becomes something other than faith in Jesus as the Christ, it can no longer claim to be true. For Christ is the truth in a manner that makes clear that the truth cannot be abstracted from any explanation of what the truth is. Thus Kierkegaard’s claim that the truth, in the sense that Christ was the truth, is not a collection of sentences, nor a definition of concepts, but rather truth in its essence is the reduplication in us that his life is the very being of truth because ‘as the truth, is a life, as the truth was in Christ, for He was the truth’.15 In Christendom, however, Christians assume that knowing about Christ is the equivalent to believing in him, but that cannot be true.16 It cannot be true because Jesus called those who would follow him to be disciples. To become a disciple is to acquire another self, that is, to become a new creature.17 A disciple may appear to be a student, but a student may learn without being transformed. In contrast, the disciple undergoes a conversion because the truth that possesses her is one in which the One who is the truth cannot be abstracted from what makes the truth true. These are complex matters that are often misunderstood because, as Kierkegaard knew, those determined by the habits of Christendom cannot help but find such an account of truth ‘extreme’. One of the ironies of being a true Christian in Christendom is the necessity to have one’s faith hidden. To be a Christian is to have a ‘hidden inwardness’ because if one’s Christianity were known some people might wish to honour and celebrate you for being a true Christian. As a result, a true Christian must remain in a hidden inwardness. Kierkegaard observes that there is a great irony that true Christians must remain hidden. In the first centuries of the church if Christians could be recognized by their enemies they could be put to death. In the ‘triumphant church’, which is the name Kierkegaard gives to the present-day Christendom church, the danger is that Christians are not put in danger by being Christian but rather Christians are rewarded and honoured because they are Christians.18 In contrast to the triumphant church the early church was a militant church. The militant church, moreover, alone is the church. The triumphant church, as well as the very concept of Christendom, is but vain conceit. Nowhere is that vanity more apparent than the triumphant church’s inability to produce martyrs. The triumphant church has the illusion that she has conquered the world, but in fact the world has conquered her.19 The triumphant church may make much of the doctrines that allegedly constitute the faith, the

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Kierkegaard, Point of View, trans. Lowrie, 114. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, trans. Lowrie, 201. Ibid., 38. For Kierkegaard’s account of what it means to be a disciple, see Philosophical Fragments, trans. Swenson and Hong, 13–16. Kierkegaard, Training in Christianity, trans. Lowrie, 211–12. Ibid., 213.

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triumphant church may celebrate her ‘orthodoxy’, but she fails to see that Christianity is not doctrine but rather a life named Jesus. Paul Holmer indicates the connections Kierkegaard is trying to make suggests that at the heart of Kierkegaard’s representation of Christian convictions is the ‘pragmatic significance of the person of Jesus Christ’.20 Holmer observes that Kierkegaard assumed that books can be written about Jesus just as they can be written about Plato. Books can be written to give objective accounts of the teachings of this or that person. An account of the institutions such figures challenged or which institutions supported them can also be described. It is also the case that such studies can try to establish the significance of each man. Yet Kierkegaard’s point, according to Holmer, is that historical accounts fail to describe Jesus because he is presented abstracted from the demands he places on those who would follow him. Jesus can only be known when the interests, the passions Jesus asks of his followers, the demand that we live by dying, win by losing, receive by giving, are constitutive of what it means to know Jesus.21 To do justice to Kierkegaard’s understanding of what is required to introduce Christianity into Christendom would require a much fuller account of his work. But hopefully enough has been said to suggest what might follow for the challenges Christians face if we are to serve the university as followers of Christ. The irony of Christendom is central to his work, but this is lost if Jesus’s claim on us is not the counterpoint. Kierkegaard undertook the thankless task of trying to help Christians see Jesus in a culture that assumed Jesus could be seen just by looking. We may face a quite different challenge.

III. WHERE WE MAY BE TODAY IN ACADEMIA Kierkegaard took his task to be the introduction of Christianity into Christendom. As I suggested above we may be in a quite different space and time. To be sure we are creatures of a Christendom that is rapidly disappearing. Fragments of its existence still give some the hope that a Christian world can be recovered. Many universities and colleges are institutions that represent some of those fragments just to the extent that they live in the tension between their Christian past and their uncertain future. By ‘uncertain future’ I do not mean whether they will survive, though it appears many will not survive, but rather what kind of self-understanding will be available to avoid becoming ‘just another university’. ‘Self-understanding’ can be but a nice way of saying ‘ideology’. I wish I could pretend to have some suggestion about what a university committed to being of service to the church might look like. I think, however, it is not first a question about the university but about the church. Do we have a church sufficiently distinctive to produce people with the imaginations to create and sustain knowledge of the world that can be described as Christian? That a college or university is sponsored and supported by Christians is not without use, but the crucial question – as I tried to suggest in The State of the University – is whether the disciplines that constitute the curriculum of such a university reflect the Christian difference. That does not mean that every discipline in such a university will be different from its counterpart in a non-Christian university. The assumption, for example, is that many of the sciences will not necessarily have what might be considered Christian content,

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Paul L. Holmer, Theology and the Scientific Study of Religion (Minneapolis: Denison, 1961), 203. Ibid., 204.

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but there may still be questions surrounding education in the sciences that Christians should care about. For example, I should think that no science in a university supported by Christians should be taught that does not teach the history of that science. Too often I fear the teaching of science in the modern university presupposes a reductionist metaphysical materialism that cannot be justified but is never made articulate and therefore is much less defended as internal to the science itself. That the history of a science must be taught at least offers the opportunity for those in the science to make the fundamental presuppositions of the science open to investigation. I have called attention to the sciences because they are usually assumed to be the most determinative challenge to the kind of account I am trying to give concerning what a university that calls itself Christian must do. But the ‘humanities’ are no less a challenge. How history, for example, should be understood and taught to reflect how Christians understand their place in the world will be – and cannot help but be – an ongoing debate. Descriptions are everything. For example: Why should Christians assume what is called ‘the American revolutionary war’ was a just war? One of the other questions that the very existence of such a university would raise is whether the parents of children who have been formed in such a university would be happy with the result such a university might have on their children. A child educated in such a university will not have been educated to be a success. Students shaped by education in an economics department that took seriously Jesus’s strictures against possessions might be ill-prepared to be good players in the market. Would the parents of students formed by a department of economics so conceived want their children back? What does all this have to do Kierkegaard? Kierkegaard attacked Christendom. The kind of university I seem to think we need in the light of a dying Christendom may suggest I am trying to re-establish something like Christendom. Sam Wells observed that anytime ‘Christian’ is used as an adjective you have an indication that some kind of Constantinianism is at work. I think he is right about that. That is why I have not used the description ‘Christian university’ but rather referred to the Christian support of the university. Yet I cannot deny that no matter how the matter is phrased the kind of university I want seems to make the church a civilizational reality. But that is what I want, that is, I want Christians to produce a material culture that can find expression through the disciplines represented in a university. If that is Constantinianism, so be it. I find it hard, however, to think such an understanding of the Christian stake in producing something like the university to be Constantinian if it is remembered that the church that makes such a university possible is one determined by the crucified Christ. A university so conceived, for example, could not organize courses in politics on the presumption that violence must be assumed necessary for the cooperative work necessary for the discovery of goods in common. Perhaps another way to put the matter is to observe what a loss it would be if Christians lacked a context for the study of Kierkegaard. The challenge, of course, is how to prevent such study from becoming a way to avoid Kierkegaard’s challenge to our complacency about how to live as Christians. Kierkegaard can only be taught well just to the extent he is allowed to call into question our very being as Christians. In a like manner, a university determined by Christian practices will by necessity be an institution that desires to change students’ lives. I do not think a university so conceived is antithetical to Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom. We no longer live in Christendom. To be sure, it is not yet clear what status the church will have in the new world aborning, but in the meantime a non-established

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church can use the shards left from the old dispensation to sustain her life. One of those shards was a strange man called Søren Kierkegaard. How fortunate for us.

FURTHER READING Burrell, David. Exercises in Religious Understanding. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016. Hauerwas, Stanley. The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of God. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Holmer, Paul L. On Kierkegaard and the Truth, edited by David J. Gouwens and Lee C. Barrett III, foreword by Stanley Hauerwas. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012. Holmer, Paul L. Theology and the Scientific Study of Religion. Minneapolis: Denison, 1961.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Kierkegaard, Theology and the Information Society BRIAN BROCK

INTRODUCTION How could a thinker who lived long before the invention of the computer and who barely left the confines of his home town of Copenhagen offer Christians today insight into how faithfully to negotiate the new cultural landscape that has been called the information society? Though the strategy may seem far-fetched, in this chapter I will suggest that Kierkegaard indeed does offer a theological diagnosis of the spiritual condition characteristic of the modern world – one that illumines in an especially potent way the dilemmas, and the promise, of Christian faith in a wired age. I will suggest that Kierkegaard raises four revealing questions about the information society. First, what makes the anonymity offered on the internet so powerfully appealing? Second, what does it do to us to intentionally and continually speed up our ways of communicating with each other? Third, what role does and should the press play in the life of modern secular-democratic nation states? Finally, what does the speeding up of communication do to our understanding of politics? By way of these questions Kierkegaard introduces an alternative proposal: that the address of Jesus Christ reopens communion with God in a manner that contradicts and so begins to unravel the existential and conceptual tangles in which the information society tends to entrap us. I first stumbled onto one of the problems Kierkegaard wants Christians to notice when working as a newspaper journalist in the mid-1990s. With the power of amplification offered by the medium come clear constraints on the content that can be communicated. I spent hours trying to articulate theological insights into contemporary events for the ‘general public’, in five hundred words or less and on a weekly deadline. A recent collection of newspaper articles written by another student of Kierkegaard, Amy Laura Hall,1 displays the best of what a theologian can do in a local newspaper. At the same time, in the prefaces Hall appends to the articles collected in the book she often ruminates on how in writing the articles she constantly butted up against the communicative limits of the medium and laments the obscuring of what she considered to be critical theological insights. It was in part a search for a forum in which I could unapologetically engage these deeper moral and intellectual questions that led me into the academy, to Kierkegaard and 1

Amy Laura Hall, Writing Home, With Love: Politics for Neighbors and Naysayers (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2016).

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eventually to an academic teaching post. There I had the surreal experience of watching graduate students sit silent in seminar discussions of the deepest of theological texts led by the most lauded of contemporary teachers – who then hurried home to present snippets of a live event for the ‘general public’ on a blog. These posts seemed to me prone to a fatal combination of self-aggrandizement and superficial summarization of the much richer theological discussions in which we had just participated. To one having recently escaped the limits of ‘fast writing’ into the haven of the slow practice of patient reading of serious texts, it seemed to me that these students’ commitment to keeping up their online profile was robbing them of the more substantive and transformative engagement available to them in live conversation. At the same time I also began noticing how many undergraduates apparently never unplugged themselves from discussions on Facebook and other social media platforms. Whether in lectures or the library, they had multiple chat boxes open and bubbling away at all times. Many said that these conversations continued throughout the night on smartphones. Everybody was at the party, it seemed, and I was amused occasionally to find myself the recipient of well-meaning advice from those who were already there: ‘Even academics need to get their work out on the internet, you know!’ I was of course aware that many academics I respected had invested significant efforts in communicating in the popular media of their day. Serious thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Reinhold Niebuhr and George Grant, for example, devoted significant efforts to presenting their insights in the popular media of radio and the newspapers. Why not try my hand at blogging? Once again I rediscovered a truth that is apparently common knowledge among bloggers: the more weighty and cross-grained to a publicly held view a blog post is, the less likely it is to generate substantive responses, or any responses at all. Not unlike my newspaper experience, I again found myself having to drastically trim the thoughts I wanted to express to fit the limits of the medium. Even on theological blogs it became apparent that – for the time being, at least – there seemed to be a strong incentivization to address accessible topics in pithy, short pieces that will draw as wide a readership as possible. Troubling new trends in other domains, such as sexuality, were also making their way into public discourse. The American politician Anthony Weiner had apparently become so addicted to ‘sexting’ strangers that he destroyed his marriage, career and may even have brought down a presidential candidate.2 Pastors tell of an epidemic of porn-addicted husbands finding the offerings of the internet more captivating than their own marital bed. At the same time (predominantly) women and girls were becoming subjects of ‘revenge porn’ attacks at the hands of friends or former lovers posting compromising pictures of them which – once on the internet – were almost impossible to expunge. Alongside these trends new and unsettling political dynamics have emerged. The first decades of the information society have been fuelled by the narrative that the information society is opening up the modern world and undermining dictatorships across the globe. Yet a range of questions have been raised about this narrative, not least as it applies to the revolution that was supposed to prove its truth, the Arab Spring. Once social media

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The 2016 documentary Weiner (directed by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg) recounts the major moment of the initial story, which later developed to play a significant role in undermining Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. Z. Byron Wolf, ‘Hillary Clinton Blames James Comey for Her Loss. Why Not Blame Anthony Weiner?’, CNN, 19 May 2017. Available online: http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/19/politics/anthony-weinerjames-comey-donald-trump-hillary-clinton/index.html (accessed 19 May 2017).

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was presented as having played the starring role, but the facts seem not to be cooperating.3 A volatility and unwieldiness has emerged in contemporary political life that has baffled and even shocked observers. What was once thought impossible in democratic societies has in fact come to pass, exemplified in the self-immolating decision by British voters to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency. Both came as shocks to the political elites of the West, who grasped that there was somehow a link to the new culture of ‘wired’ society by mechanisms almost no one understands. With the election of Trump, the world’s first tweeting head of state, the impact of digital technologies on the very structures of political authority is manifest to all, though again without real comprehension. Though shocking to many at the time, Kierkegaard, we will soon see, would have been little surprised. For him the volatility of democratic politics had direct links with accelerated forms of communication working in tandem with the culture of anonymity and the vitriolic and destructive forms of social engagement that so readily colonizes it, in his day as in ours. The burden of this chapter is to show why Kierkegaard’s analysis of the changes in human communication that were becoming evident in the new mass media – which was just being born in his day – can help us see the links between contemporary trends in the domains of sex, politics, education and religion. Beginning by surveying Kierkegaard’s observations about ‘the pleasures of the impersonal’, that is, the lure of anonymity, I will next turn to his critique of the emphasis on speed and emotivism that he saw as characteristic of the emerging media society. These forces tended to produce characters he believed to be capable only of what he called ‘dribbling performances’ that might look good in 140 characters but could not stand deeper interrogation. In Kierkegaard’s view the most worrying aspect of these cultural trajectories is the manner in which this reordering of human communication obfuscates power relations in modern political communities. In a concluding section I will then outline the constructive alternative Kierkegaard held out to Christians in the modern world – one that remains highly suggestive for Christians today who want to think more deeply about how to negotiate the various currents of the information society.

I. LEARNING FROM THE CORSAIR Before turning directly to the details of Kierkegaard’s theological-cultural analysis, two prefatory remarks are in order. The first is a negation: we need to dispel the entirely understandable – though mistaken – view that Kierkegaard’s views on the modern means of mass communication were hopelessly skewed defensive reactions to the rough and public humiliation he experienced at the hands of the editors and journalists of The Corsair, with whom he picked a very public fight during the years from 1846 to 1848. What is interesting for our purposes about The Corsair newspaper is that it was arguably a direct precursor to the contemporary political blog. Its writers often wrote anonymously, diverging from the mainstream journalism of the day in majoring on scathing political caricatures, satires and critiques that often tipped over into the venting of malicious slander. In addition, the paper did no original journalistic reporting but devoted itself to commentary on material appearing elsewhere in the papers. Again starkly reminiscent

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Maeve Shearlaw, ‘Egypt Five Years On: Was it Ever a “Social Media Revolution”?’, The Guardian, 25 January 2016. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/25/egypt-5-years-on-was-it-ever-asocial-media-revolution (accessed 28 February 2017).

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of many particularly inflammatory political blogs today, the paper quickly became the highest circulating paper not only in Copenhagen but also in all of Denmark, at least during the period that came to be called its ‘reign of terror’, from 1840 to 1846. Having so closely attended in his academic work to the distinctions between modes of irony, and also feeling himself to be called personally to a public engagement with these newspapers as a form of Christian street-preaching,4 Kierkegaard did so with a clear vision of what he was after. Anyone engaging in satire, if they are to be ‘at all beneficial and not cause irreparable harm, must have the resource of a consistent and well-grounded ethical view, a sacrificial unselfishness, a high-born nobility that renounces the moment; otherwise the medicine becomes infinitely and incomparably worse than the sickness’.5 Given this view, it is unsurprising that he came to understand his engagement with The Corsair as motivated by the desire to expose and even destroy the mouthpiece of an ironic spirit that he felt to be scornful and corrosive of any genuine community or political life, and that was made exponentially more dangerous by the amplification provided by the printing press and the format of the daily newspaper. The episode rendered Kierkegaard the laughingstock of Copenhagen, since he apparently came out at the rough end of what we would today call a ‘flame war’. He learned the hard way a lesson that we citizens of the digital society have to learn very quickly – that to engage in a debate in the comment boxes is a futile and degrading affair. But he also believed that this very public humiliation sharpened his sense of his vocation.6 Later, in what has come to be called his ‘attack upon Christendom’ (1854–5) he went on the offensive, producing his own weekly paper, using the existing media and its conventions to devastate the church by revealing its problematic enmeshment in this culture. That he so obviously suffered the worst that could be inflicted by what we might call the ‘information society, version 1.0’ and also knew it well enough to exploit it to call the church to faithfulness begin to suggest why he may be especially well suited to help Christians today spot the relevant problematics of which they must be aware if they wish to live faithfully and with integrity in an information society. Having both suffered and exploited the destructive power of the information society he had every incentive to do what he in fact did: to probingly analyse it. What is clear is that Kierkegaard’s theological reading of the emerging mass media culture was driven by fundamental questions that reached far deeper than would have been required were his sole obsession to destroy The Corsair for having publicly humiliated him. Nor was his well-known emphasis that people needed first to become individuals before they could critically engage the superficialities of the crowd a thinly veiled elitism of the Nietzschean

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Aaron Edwards, ‘Kierkegaard as Socratic Street Preacher?: Reimagining the Dialectic of Direct and Indirect Communication for Christian Proclamation’, Harvard Theological Review 110, no. 2 (2017): 280–300. TA, 74. The point was put more explicitly in his journals: ‘Now my view (in line with my sense of the comic, of course) is that in a small country like Denmark a disproportionate and immoral phenomenon such as The Corsair does great harm and is of no benefit whatsoever, of no benefit because it counterfeits and taints the comic and thereby silences the authentic comic, just as a naughty child’s impertinence can cause the more sensible person not to come and visit or express himself in a family where such things go on, even if he otherwise loves the family very much, does great harm because it seduces the unstable, the irresponsible, the sensate, those who are lost in earthly passions, seduces them by means of ambiguity, lack of character, and the concealment of brash contempt under the pursuit of the comic.’ COR, 179–80 / SKP VII 1 B 55, p. 277. ‘Voluntarily exposing myself to attack by The Corsair is no doubt the most intensive thing along the order of genius that I have done. It will have results in all my writing, will be extremely important for my whole task with respect to Christianity and to my elucidation of Christianity, to casting it entirely into reflection.’ JP 6:6373, p. 133 / SKS 21, NB10:109, p. 312.

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variety (who, incidentally, shared a moral revulsion for the newspapers and disdained opinions held just because ‘everyone’ holds them).7 In this sense Kierkegaard can be read as a midwife serving the birth of a more faithful contemporary Christianity. My second prefatory remark is positive. Kierkegaard himself encourages us to leap from his time to ours in the quest to gain purchase on Western societies that have undergone massive changes in media communication in the intervening century and a half. Already in his early work (Philosophical Fragments) Kierkegaard had aimed to take up a position within the social and linguistic world of his contemporaries. He emulated the public and rhetorical stance that Socrates struck in Athens in order to highlight the reality that the claim of Christ can only be accepted or rejected by individuals.8 Kierkegaard understood this in theological terms as a kenotic and empathetic mode of engagement with his contemporaries, following his more proximate precursor and model, J. G. Hamann.9 He entered deeply into the inner worlds of the people of his own time and place in the attempt to think himself inside their desires and dilemmas in all their frightening complexity. His hope in doing so was to diffuse the internal contradictions they suffered by offering substantive alternatives.10 Because he was paying such empathetically engaged and intensely material attention to developments in the lives of his fellow citizens he was able to spot developments being birthed in his day that have only recently become such obvious features of the information society. I am, on the one hand, suggesting that Kierkegaard’s analysis of the dynamics of nineteenth-century Danish society remains a description of cultural developments that remain at the heart of the information society. In this sense he remains our contemporary. And on the other hand, Kierkegaard understood his own example to be an encouragement for us too to approach our age and neighbours as empathetically engaged readers of our culture. Just as he thought the example of Socrates (and Jesus) demanded his immersion in Danish society, so too, we must assume, would he have expected Christians today to dive deep into the perplexities and paradoxes of modern life, in all their richness and perfusion. It is this sense of his contemporaneity with our situation that makes me bold to draw the connection between his context and our digital society in this particular way. The daily newspaper was the first great accelerator and synchronizer of public converse since the printing press. Our current cultural acceleration is linked to the technical developments that can broadly be designated as digital technologies.11 The intertwined cultural and technical developments on which I will be focusing in this chapter are locatable by way of terms like ‘networked’, ‘connectivity’, ‘being in the cloud’ or being ‘wired’ – all terms that presume the digital to be an environment in which we can live, that has its own characteristic dynamics and temporality, is ever-present and all-encompassing. This environment is one that is accessed through desktop and laptop computers but increasingly through mobile phones. It is the interlocked nature of these technical and cultural developments

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See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Part 3, section 7, 152–4. Edwards, ‘Kierkegaard as Socratic Street Preacher?’, 286, 294, 300. John R. Betz, ‘Hamann before Kierkegaard: A Systematic Theological Oversight’, Pro Ecclesia 16, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 299–333. See Jørgen K. Bukdahl, Kierkegaard and the Common Man, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2001). Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

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that invites us to look more deeply into the continuities between our cultural moment and Kierkegaard’s, guided by his tutelage.

II. PLEASURES OF THE IMPERSONAL We begin our more detailed examination of Kierkegaard’s views starting with his account of one of the moral commonplaces of our digital culture: that the anonymity of the internet allows us to explore different aspects of ourselves and therefore to discover ourselves in a way that is not possible when all our mistakes are being watched and the eyes of the enforcers of moral convention weigh heavily on us. The internet, it is often concluded, is the ultimate space of freedom in which to explore alternative identities. Kierkegaard was not only conceptually aware of this pleasure but practiced it himself. In his pseudonymous writings he was able to explore utterances and approaches to life he did not personally espouse. ‘The Seducer’s Diary’ in Either/Or is a prime exemplar of Kierkegaard’s capacity to imaginatively enter taboo and in many ways repulsive forms of life precisely because he was speaking in another’s voice behind a veil of anonymity. As I have already noted, Kierkegaard believed he did so for a moral purpose, proposing instead that we might revel in anonymity not to ennoble other people but to exploit, torment or embarrass them. It occurs to me that mankind would be mighty happy if it managed to find a way for everyone to be a virtuoso in ventriloquism – how satisfied we would be with anonymity! As a matter of fact, the inventions which really please mankind are either tinged with the rebellion of the race against God (the tower of Babel . . .) or, if they are related to the individual, they are inventions which satisfy his boyishness. Yes, school boys find great sport in being able to say something without the teacher’s being able to discover who said it. Boyishness is related to the impersonal, and it is impersonality which pleases man – that is, personally being impersonal, being a person but without any danger or responsibility, being an ill-tempered malicious person perhaps, venting all one’s spite – but by anonymity or by ventriloquism.12 To see the perspicuity of Kierkegaard’s worry we need only call to mind the cast of characters that have become all-too-familiar scourges of the digital village: the internet ‘troll’ who delights in provoking and taunting people while hiding in anonymity; the purveyor and consumer of exploitative pornography, such as child porn; the groomers of children; the posters of pictures of ex-lovers as an act of revenge. Such activities, Kierkegaard’s line of analysis suggests, pervert the playful and ennobling potential of anonymity by exploiting the potential to hide one’s identity in order to evade moral responsibility. There is a double anonymity at work here: the very techniques that allow us to hide also tend to form the person we become when we inhabit them, as David Lappano has pointed out. Anonymity, in this sense, is not simply the act of hiding one’s name from publication, but it is also the ability and the desire to remove oneself from one’s communication with others, to place the distance of indifference or reflection between oneself and another. This distancing is also true for a person’s own self-relation. Thus, Kierkegaard

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JP 3:3224, p. 488 / SKS 26, NB33:33, p. 272.

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can claim, people ‘write anonymously over their signature, yes, even speak anonymously’ in face to face discourse.13 The deeper implication of this escape from responsibility is that the new sort of self that is produced is one whose very pleasures depend on escaping from responsibility. Here we encounter figures like the porn addict, who Kierkegaard encourages us to understand as someone who has come to inhabit a world in which sexuality is a matter of finding an ideal image of another person configured according to the laws of our own gratification.14 Instead of engaging in the messy business of living with a real individual and developing a multifaceted relationship that includes the erotic, the addict to pornography has overwritten his or her personal self with an anonymized self who prefers relating to ideal images of the sexually desirable human being rather than real persons. Kierkegaard’s insight into the psychology of anonymity also offers us the key to understand how the initial emotional charge that the married person might get from transgressing a marital bond by ‘sexting’ someone under the veil of anonymity is intimately tied to the anonymization of the self that makes such behaviour seem more immediately attractive than the more complex task of sustaining an intimate relationship with a proximate spouse. As the American psychologist and social scientist Sherry Turkle has documented in some detail, these examples are just the tip of the anonymization iceberg: ‘we seem determined to give human qualities to objects and content to treat each other as things . . . Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other.’15 In his book Better than Well, the American bioethicist Carl Elliott has traced how this ‘anonymization of one’s signature’ is combining with new medical techniques and understandings of the body to generate startling new moral certainties. Initially wondering about the reasons why diagnoses of gender dysphoria were exponentially expanding, his research led him to uncover an explosive proliferation of unique forms of sexualized desire, such as the desire to be an amputee. In the anonymous world of internet chat rooms subcultures are springing up in which people’s non-sexualized dissatisfactions with their bodies can not only be openly expressed, but can be imaginatively elaborated in disturbing ways. Anorexics, for instance, can spur one another on to greater feats of starvation, or paedophiles discuss the merits and demerits of children’s bodies. The idea of having one’s legs amputated might never even enter the minds of some people until it is suggested to them. Yet once it is suggested, and not just suggested but paired with imagery that a person’s past may have primed him or her to appreciate, that act becomes possible. Give the wish for it a name and a treatment, link it to a set of related disorders, give it a medical explanation rooted in childhood memory, and you are on the way to setting up just the kind of conceptual category that makes treating it thinkable in a way it was not thinkable before. Elective amputation was once self-mutilation; now it is a treatment for a mental disorder. Toss this mixture

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David Lappano, ‘A Coiled Spring: Kierkegaard on the Press, the Public and a Crisis of Communication’, The Heythrop Journal 55, no. 5 (2014): 783–98 [787], quoting TA, 94. For more on this connection, see Aaron Edwards, ‘Thrill of the Chaste: The Pursuit of “Love” as the Perpetual Dialectic between the “Real” and the “Ideal Image” in Kierkegaard’s “The Seducer’s Diary ” ’, Literature and Theology 30, no. 1 (March 2016): 15–32. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), xiv, 1.

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into the vast fan of the Internet and it will be dispersed at speeds unimagined even a decade ago.16 Inhabiting the techniques of anonymity courts formation as people who have themselves become anonymized. Desires are mimetically transferred between people behind the technical veil of anonymity. And because humans are social beings, even such anonymized people will inevitably congregate, only now within an increasingly insulated discursive world governed by the social rules of anonymization. The very bodiliness that had initially been screened out of communication in order to preserve anonymity now reinters the scene in previously unthinkable forms. Even anonymous communication remains between people; and so it cannot escape the political.

III. SPEED AND EMOTIONALISM Kierkegaard was spared what has been called the ‘perpetual emotion machine’ – the television. He no doubt would have watched in horror as it accentuated the very trajectories that worried him in the daily newspaper. Everything is noisy; and just as strong drink is said to stir the blood, so everything in our day, even the most insignificant project, even the most empty communication, is designed merely to jolt the senses or to stir up the masses, the crowd, the public, noise! And man, this clever fellow, seems to have become sleepless in order to invent ever new instruments to increase noise, to spread noise and insignificance with the greatest possible haste and on the greatest possible scale . . . communication is indeed soon brought to its lowest point with regard to meaning, and simultaneously the means of communication are indeed brought to their highest with regard to speedy and overall circulation.17 These are dynamics that have again been exponentially accelerated by the internet. Today even the most seasoned participants of contemporary media are finding this accelerating pace disorienting, an acceleration that also directly contributes to upheavals in the political life of Western democracies. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s press officer Craig Oliver made a telling observation about the whirlwind campaign during the 2016 referendum on whether or not Britain should exit the European Union (‘Brexit’). He reports a conversation he had during the heat of the campaign in which the veteran journalist Francis Elliott, the political editor of The Times, expressed a common sense of moral disorientation: His [Elliott’s] question is: how can things possibly continue at this pace? The ‘burn rate’ of stories is so high, it can’t be sustained. A story emerges and is devoured in a fraction of a news cycle. Things that would normally have played out over days go in hours. I suspect the pace won’t slacken – it’s the logical conclusion of the biggest political story for a generation colliding with a digital revolution in media, shortening attention spans, and the need for more and more sensation.18

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Carl Elliott, Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (New York: W. W. Norton: 2003), 232. FSE, 47–8. Craig Oliver, Unleashing Demons: The Inside Story of Brexit (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2016), 129.

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Kierkegaard, no doubt, would have found Elliott’s expression of shock naive, quaint even, since the relevant dynamics have now been at work for over a hundred years, along with the relevant modes of moral resistance: [T]his invention (the press) still intimidates people far too much. People must become even more accustomed to see the misuse of the press so that they can quietly begin to form an estimate of the relationship between the good and the harm this invention has brought to mankind . . . the press (the daily press) is a disproportionate medium of communication. Suppose someone invented an instrument, a convenient little talking tube which could be heard over the whole land – I wonder if the police would not forbid it, fearing that the whole country would become mentally deranged if it were used. In the same way, to be sure, guns are prohibited. Books are tolerable, but preferably large books; because of their very size they have no connection with the momentary. On the whole the evil in the daily press consists in its being calculated to make, if possible, the moment a thousand or ten thousand times more inflated and important than it already is. But all moral upbringing consists first and foremost in being weaned away from the momentary.19 We can, of course, imagine that our online modes of communication were ordered in other ways, but it is important at this juncture simply to note that the evident prioritization of the wired culture that has in fact emerged slants strongly towards communication as the rapid exchange of information or opinion. Most of the most substantive conversations being held online in blogs and other more extended fora remain, as Alan Jacobs observes, ‘woefully deficient and will necessarily remain so unless they develop an architecture that is less bound by the demands of urgency – or unless more smart people refuse the dominant architecture’.20 We have not yet seen the development of web architectures that lend themselves to sustained, in-depth reflection. Instead, we have created one that is best for making appointments and sending short messages – in essence, one best adapted for signalling presence through the offering of opinions as ‘likes’, and dislikes, smiles and frowns. When penetrating writing appears – and it does – it shows clear marks of having been formed in slower domains than the blog or chat room. But when people so trained spend too much time on social media, Jacobs observes, ‘what happens more often than not . . . is the conversion of really good scholars into really lousy journalists. With few exceptions, posts at the “academic” or “intellectual” blogs I used to frequent have become the brief and cursory announcement of opinions, not the free explorations of new and dynamic thinking.’21 The arrangement of hardware and software that sustain the otherwise diverse activities of text messaging and posting on Facebook, Twitter and so on are geared to maintaining brief but real-time contact. These technologies increase the number of people accessible to us, as well as our ability to ‘information forage’, but only by decreasing the content that is being communicated. Thus the prioritization of instantaneous forms of relating to one another drives towards ever shorter and less substantive interactions and more formulaic exchanges of information. A message now communicates at least as much by its form and

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JP 2:2157, pp. 482–3 / SKS 21, NB8:3, p. 145. Alan Jacobs, ‘Goodbye, Blog: The Friend of Information but the Enemy of Thought’, Books & Culture, 1 May 2006. Available online: http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2006/mayjun/17.36.html (accessed 29 June 2017). Ibid.

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timing (Hi!, ☺, XO) than its content – which is why the bulk mining of metadata is such a potent form of surveillance.22 These more formulaic messages have settled in as the means of our communion. Few feel any longer the loss of a forum for communicating complex ideas, since the pleasures of more dense modes of communication are so much less intense than the instantaneous pleasures of feeling constantly part of a collective simultaneity. The American Trappist monk Thomas Merton, like Kierkegaard, sensed that the pace of the modern media society was its most spiritually deadening feature. His own response was to refuse to join the news cycle in real time. He committed to reading only old newspapers in an attempt to preserve the sensitivities he believed were lost when moderns internalized the frantic spirit of news cycle.23 Merton is a useful intermediate figure between Kierkegaard and us in revealing the link between the daily newspaper and the reorientation of temporal sensibility of the wired generation, who are constantly affectively engaged in maintaining the flow of messages in real time. He grasped in a more fleshed-out way what Kierkegaard had already anticipated: that the new media would foster vastly different practices of reading and attention.24 Recognizing the implications of this feature of the digital society, and in the tradition of Merton, contemporary Christians may seek to develop approaches to unplugging from the digital realm in order to resist the transformation of time that is demanded by the urgency of social media. Kierkegaard’s engagement with The Corsair is perhaps best appreciated by the contemporary church as an encouragement to be involved with the world and to risk missteps solely in order to serve its genuine liberation. At the same time, for any such kenotic engagement to make a genuine liberative contribution, it cannot take its orientation from the moral parameters that define the digital environment. What seems clear is that the habits of discipline and moral formation necessary to be deeply immersed in a theological tradition – and thus that might sustain a morally robust critical engagement in the digital environment – will require a devotional and intentional development that is different in kind from the habits and forms of attention required to be good citizens of the social media universe. Attending to one’s Facebook and Twitter feeds as well as the reading and writing of paragraphs in a blog is a qualitatively different activity than reading, digesting and being changed by a text like Augustine’s City of God or Barth’s Church Dogmatics. The sheer difficulty and otherness with which such texts confront us is theologically important in raising the question of whether in fact we and our forms of communication may be anomalous or even inferior to that of other Christians. This is to be forced in turn to ask theologically crucial questions about why some forms of communication might have advantages over others. And this is a question that highlights another noteworthy modern development: the tendency to foster what Kierkegaard dubbed ‘dribbling performances’.

22

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Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the Surveillance State (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014), 90–169. ‘Certainly events happen and they affect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as “news” . . . The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, no longer as a stimulant . . . when you hear news without the “need” to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too.’ Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 151. Christine Rosen, ‘People of the Screen’, The New Atlantis 22 (Fall 2008): 23–6; Matt Richtel, ‘Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain’, New York Times, 16 August 2010. Available online: http://www.nytimes. com/2010/08/16/technology/16brain.html?hp (accessed 3 March 2017).

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IV. DRIBBLING PERFORMANCES I remarked in the introduction on having been struck by the tendency of graduate students to be drawn by the lure of blogging and tweeting away from the intensive study of difficult texts from the Christian tradition. Research suggests that college students are continually gravitating toward ever more rapid forms of communication and abandoning ‘slower’ forms. And what was once fast is quickly too slow. Today, it appears, many students consider emailing too slow and tedious to keep up with, and live so completely in the social media environment that they rarely even go to the trouble to consult search engines. Having persuaded a large number of college students to download an application that tracked their computer usage, one American researcher discovered that wired students spent an average of 123 minutes a day on a computer, the vast majority of which (31 minutes) was devoted to social networking. In contrast, students spent only six minutes a day on email, and even less on searching for content using search engines – only four minutes.25 While it is safe to assume that such statistics are only snapshots of a rapidly changing landscape, the trend seems clear. Drawn by the constant stimulus of social networking, any sense of the satisfaction and purpose that comes with sustained concentration on difficult intellectual tasks is being steadily eroded among contemporary college and graduate students. This trend also hints at the reasons for another phenomenon I noted in my introduction – that more substantive writing on the internet often receives little or no response from readers, who have been thoroughly enculturated with the sense that the form of conversation to be had on social media makes more demanding reading offputting. Kierkegaard would not have been surprised in the least by these trends. Dribbling oneself away in trifles, that is the characteristic achievement for our age. That’s also what Peter is doing in the name of cordiality and conviviality, but in our age of envy and levelling it is how to make a hit. A real achievement, the fruit perhaps of several years’ strenuous work, always enjoins a certain silence – which embarrasses the age, indeed causes offence – it has something of the odor of aristocracy . . . The whole age is, from one end to the other, a conspiracy against real achievement . . . I too have a heart, and I have tried to continue to have a heart, and tried therefore to keep it in the right place, not on my lips at one moment and in my trousers the next, but always in the proper place, so that I do not confuse cordiality with chatter and drivel.26 He explicitly intuited that at least one aspect of this trajectory would be especially distressing: a rising inability to distinguish the genuinely substantive from the superficial and salacious, the momentous from the trivial. In our time everyone is able to write something or other about everything, but no one is able or willing to endure the strenuous labor of thinking through a single thought exhaustively in all its sharpest implications. As a result, the writing of trifles is particularly appreciated in our time, and one who writes a substantial book almost makes himself the object of ridicule. In the old days one read substantial books, and insofar as one read pamphlets and newspapers, one did not care to have it known. Now everyone feels duty-bound to have read what is in the papers and in the pamphlets but

25 26

Courtney Rubin, ‘Technology and the College Generation’, New York Times, 27 September 2013. Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1996), 511. See also JP 6:6706, p. 363 / SKS 24, NB22:36, p. 123.

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is ashamed to have read a substantial book all the way through; he is afraid this will be regarded as a mark of dullness.27 Architectural features of social media platforms tend to exacerbate these dynamics in being geared to track and provide instantaneous feedback on numbers of readers and quantification of the popularity of one’s writing. Massive pressures are exerted to post content that will generate instantaneous reader responses incentivizing the uploading of pictures and videos over writing. These have been temptations for all writers since the advent of the printing press, but it is one that exerts ever-increasing force when it is possible for a picture or short clip to ‘go viral’ and can now be seen by millions of people within minutes. Kierkegaard’s aim is to show us the paradoxical connection between the will to anonymity and the will to draw attention to one’s self that has become the defining characteristic of social media culture. What results is a strong incentivization of the ‘writing [posting] of trifles’. The striking rapidity with which Trump, after taking office as the US president in early 2017, was able not only to rehabilitate the persona of the internet troll but also to establish the term ‘fake news’, points to the prophetic nature of Kierkegaard’s insight on this point. We seem to be approaching a tipping-point in a culture that is losing faith in its powers to hold converse. As the British politician Michael Gove infamously put it in the course of the Brexit debate, people have ‘had enough of experts’.28 The serious has become trivial, the trivial serious. With this involution we have entered what has been called a new era of ‘post truth politics’, which, notes one commentator, ‘is made possible by two threats to this public sphere: a loss of trust in institutions that support its infrastructure and deep changes in the way knowledge of the world reaches the public’.29 The ways in which the campaigns were prosecuted during the Brexit referendum and the presidential campaign of Donald Trump both showed clear marks of having been determined by the accelerated pace of contemporary journalism. In the British context, pro-Brexit campaigners boldly made claims that were patently false or unprovable, such as that leaving the EU would mean £350 million could be ‘brought home’ to fund the NHS (National Health Service), or that the Queen backed Brexit. Such stories were offered to – and taken up by – the press so quickly that there was little time or resources to refute them, nor was there much evidence that the ‘general public’ was interested in a more balanced accounting of the state of play. On the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump pursued the same strategy, boldly making claims that were not only provably untrue but understood as gross exaggerations by the electorate, such as that Barack Obama was the founder of ISIS. Kierkegaard, one suspects, would be of the opinion that this represents the co-option of the main organs of the mainstream press by the corrupting irony that typified The Corsair in his day and the political blogs of our day. For some time the mainstream press has taken its role not to do investigative reporting but to broadcast the claims made by the official spokesperson for both sides of any given political debate. This prepared the way for spokespersons to emerge who were prepared to deploy a type of ironic speech that dares people to question what is being claimed. At this 27 28

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JP 1:155, p. 59 / SKS 18, JJ:422, p. 280. Michael Deacon, ‘EU Referendum: Who needs experts when we’ve got Michael Gove?’, Telegraph, 6 June 2016. Available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/06/eu-referendum-who-needs-expertswhen-weve-got-michael-gove/ (accessed 29 June 2017). ‘ Yes, I’d Lie to You: Dishonesty in Politics is Nothing New; but the Manner in Which Some Politicians Now Lie, and the Havoc They May Wreak by Doing So, Are Worrying’, Economist, 10 September 2016, 5.

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cultural tipping point what Kierkegaard saw as the dangers to the individual and society of corrosive anonymous commentary has become incarnated in political characters who inhabit it as a winning political formula. Many of the figures who currently dominate political discourse in North Atlantic liberal democracies have consciously chosen to model themselves as the sorts of bombastic bomb-throwers who, Kierkegaard insisted, could never build but only debase the public. Fully comprehending the incredible short-term power that is to be gained by doing so, they have explicitly embraced the stance of ironic irresponsibility towards the generic public against which Kierkegaard warned. Journalists are forced to try to figure out anew how to report on political agents who know that there is political efficacy in uttering the sort of entertaining falsehoods that once were the preserve of political satire. This has led to one more circle of political consequences, as Kierkegaard again foresaw.

V. TURNING POLITICAL AUTHORITY INTO A TECHNIQUE OF CROWD-SWAYING I remarked in my introduction on the sense of limitation that comes with journalistic writing. Kierkegaard is beginning to give us a handle on this phenomenon: the rapid pace and the demand to speak to ‘the public’ drastically narrows the way political questions can be posed. The pressure is for journalism to shift focus from uncovering truth to getting the messages of the powerful out. The press . . . pretends to be reporting a factual situation and aims to produce it. There is something that the journalist wants to promote, and perhaps there is no one at all who thinks about it or cares about it; what does the journalist do then? In lofty tones he writes an article about its being a need deeply felt by everyone, etc. His newspaper perhaps has wide circulation, and now the game is under way. That is, the article is read, discussed; another paper perhaps proceeds to write against it; there are polemics and a sensation is created … now the stirring is there.30 When politicians have become satirists content to say whatever it takes to gain followers, Kierkegaard suggests that journalists are driven to redouble their efforts to hold people’s attention. This, he proposes, is to subject them even more firmly to the rule of efficiency in moving people and getting hits. This abstraction, whether it is called the public, or the majority, or the crowd, or, meaninglessly, the people, this abstraction is used politically for movement . . . This abstraction is the stake for which the political game is played . . . No, cards must be played for money, and the political game must be played for the crowd, to see who can get the most à tout prix [at any price] on his side, or the most who with their feet go over to his side.31 These factors all converge to produce a drastic narrowing of the political questions that can be meaningfully discussed. No one knows this better than the spin doctor. Spin doctors are almost always journalists who have gone over to work for the politician. They are paid to ensure that the politician’s message gains the ear of the public. Once again

30 31

BA, 246. WA, 229–30.

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David Cameron’s press officer (spin doctor) Craig Oliver provides a particularly revealing observation. The scene occurs during the Brexit referendum campaign. In order to cut short what had become an exasperatingly long debate with senior politicians who wanted to campaign with both a positive message about the benefits of the European Union and a negative warning about the negative financial impact of leaving the union, Oliver curtly insisted that the messages were mutually exclusive: ‘ “I’m sorry, they are,” I say. “The reporting of this won’t be both – it’s one or the other. News doesn’t operate in double messages and it makes it look as if we can’t make our mind up.” ’32 It is important to meditate on the reality that spin doctors like Oliver, who was once an editor of the most powerful media organization in Britain, the BBC, often end up in private high-level discussions where they coach politicians on what their message needs to be if they are to prevail politically. A revolving door effect is produced as journalists realize that if they report events in the way those in power appreciate, they might well end up inside the government. Thus the mainstream media is given every incentive to stay in the good graces of political power. Here the exceptions prove the rule. Having been tapped to disseminate the materials gathered by the infamous whistle-blower Edward Snowden – who in 2013 embarrassed the American security establishment by revealing the vast scale of American government surveillance – the journalist Glenn Greenwald was well placed to notice how quickly the media pivoted from covering the genuinely shocking scope of American government surveillance to protecting the ruling administration by vilifying the whistle-blower himself – along with the journalists who told his story. This vilification of the messengers proceeded despite the fact that many major news outlets had consistently known but refused to publish similar patently newsworthy stories about government wrongdoing during the Bush and Obama administrations.33 Greenwald’s conclusion is that the Snowden affair ought to be read in a way that confirms Kierkegaard’s worst suspicions about the tendency of the modern press to become a servant of political power. The hostility toward Snowden was not hard to explain. The hostility toward the reporter breaking the story – myself – is perhaps more complex . . . there was, I believe, also anger and shame over the truth that adversarial journalism had exposed: reporting that angers the government reveals the real role of so many mainstream journalists, which is to amplify power. But far and away, the most significant reason for the hostility was that establishment media figures have accepted the rule of dutiful spokespeople for political officials, especially where national security is concerned. It follows, then, that like the officials themselves, they are contemptuous of those who challenge or undermine Washington’s centers of power . . . US establishment journalism is anything but an outsider force. It is wholly integrated into the nation’s dominant political power. Culturally, emotionally, and socioeconomically, they are one and the same. Rich, famous, insider journalists do not want to subvert the status quo that so lavishly rewards them. Like all courtiers, they are eager to defend the system that vests them with their privileges and contemptuous of anyone who challenges that system.34

32 33 34

Oliver, Unleashing Demons, 310. Greenwald, No Place to Hide, 54–8. Ibid., 232, 235. See 210–47.

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Let us take one step back to see how we have gotten from Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen to the demonization of Snowden by a mainstream press ashamed at having been shown to be slavish servants of political power. Kierkegaard, as we saw, believed that ‘the press . . . pretends to be reporting a factual situation and aims to produce it’. The contemporary insightfulness of this observation might best be fleshed out by reference to the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s conception of ‘infra-law’.35 He understood this as those mechanisms that lie at the boundaries of formal laws but that allow governments to steer the behaviour of citizens in public and in private without directly invoking legal sanctions. With only a thin layer of overseeing cameras and private security guards, contemporary political authorities are able to mete out penalties for most mid-level infractions (from parking tickets to tax evasion to minor theft) while an even thinner layer of state-employed enforcement officers need be deployed to suppress the few more aggressive infractions. Through these mechanisms the older threat of the judgement by legal authorities remains, but in a more diffuse and differentiated manner. Contemporary thinkers like the American novelist and social commentator Dave Eggers have observed that social media is increasingly being incorporated as part of the apparatus of this infra-law. In the brave new world of social media, he suggests, the primal fear motivating behaviour is ‘FOMO’ (Fear Of Missing Out) and feeling uncool, the primal motivator being the desire to be ‘liked’ and watched.36 This account presumes that the social signalling of identity through the display of each person’s tastes and opinions on social media is a relatively minor extension of the well-developed culture of individualist expressivism.37 In such a cultural framework the fear of being labelled uncool and the desire to be part of the in-crowd can be far more effectively harnessed to shape behaviour by corporations and governments than even the most effective routines of the old penalty-reward system of infra-law. Young people today might be persuaded to work hard to get top grades in school to please their parents, but they will work even harder to be in the right clothes and be seen in the right places to project the right image on social media, a reality that marketing experts have been quick to exploit.38 While the older techniques of infra-law sufficed for training good workers, the new ones aim at fostering the willing and compliant consumer. Under the umbrella of the corporation, social media has thus become the favourite marketing domain of the corporation.39 Tensions are plainly possible with the old arbiter of law, the state, with its interests not in making money but in keeping the peace. Increasingly, however, these two aims are seen to converge in the unified interest in producing the perfect docility of democracies populated by hardworking consumers.

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The term is developed in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), Part 3. This observation is developed in Dave Eggers, The Circle (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2013). Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 80–8. ‘Disney Turns to Mommy Bloggers for Marketing Help’, Reuters, 15 June 2015. Available online: http:// www.nydailynews.com/life-style/disney-turns-mommy-bloggers-marketing-article-1.2258381 (accessed 29 June 2017). Seth Porges, ‘How Big Businesses Are Maxing Out the Social Media Multiplier ’, Forbes, 2 May 2013. Available online: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethporges/2013/02/05/how-big-businesses-are-maxing-out-the-socialmedia-multiplier (accessed 29 June 2017).

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The link I have been suggesting with this detour through the idea of infra-law is that these trends represent the maturation of the era Kierkegaard saw being born, in which the journalist ‘pretends to be reporting a factual situation and aims to produce it’. Techniques for instilling and shaping the public’s fears and desires for approval were being invented in his day that are now intentionally being made more subtle and powerful but which are based on the very same psychological tricks. Like the journalism of Kierkegaard’s day, the techniques deployed by modern politicians are less about deploying force to shape behaviour and more about informing us that it is important to garner large numbers of ‘smiles’ or ‘likes’ while avoiding the ignominy of low ‘share’ numbers. One of the most important implications of the rise of these techniques of communication is that they create a dangerous gap between the manner in which government policymakers and business executives gauge the wishes of citizens. Rather than holding votes, they most often assess public opinion by tracking to information flows that take consumer behaviour as a more accurate indicator of citizen opinion than explicit public converse.40 We know that our political authorities will be saying whatever they need to say in public in order to gain a seat on the political stage and, paradoxically, that their actual activity of governing will be steered by numerical datasets to which the rest of us have no access. It is no exaggeration to say that modern society has reached a significant nadir when the governments of democratic states have been habituated to using public communication as a propaganda platform and its citizens have come to experience such communication from its political elites as ‘spam’.41 A related development of trends spotted by Kierkegaard is the pulverization of any pretence that the media speaks to ‘the’ public. A myriad of parallel conversations has emerged, the silo-communication that is characteristic of social media platforms like Facebook in which people attempt to gain purchase on events by sharing stories that they like with friends of like mind.42 These smaller communication silos and social media ecosystems can and are being manipulated by private companies and governments in order to manufacture political consent. Voters today are much more easily swung around to the view of political power by shaping what can be said and seen in conversational silos in which dissenters can be quietly quashed.43 As Kierkegaard foresaw, the power to shape public perception is becoming the new coin of Western wired societies; indeed, it is its animating voltage. This evolution in modern patterns of communication begs for theological analysis, and here is where Kierkegaard starts: ‘The idol, the tyrant, of our age is “the many,” “the crowd,” statistics . . . voting by ballot is the productive power in relation to the deification of statistics.’44 The Christian faith is centrally concerned with the question of communication, being the confession of a people constituted by individuals who have been claimed

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Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), 150–69. Finn Brunton, Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Janine Wedel, Unaccountable: How the Establishment Corrupted Our Finances, Freedom and Politics and Created an Outsider Class (New York: Pegasus Books, 2014), chapter 5: ‘Privatizing Media, Performing “Truth” ’. Shakina Gunaratna, ‘Report: Facebook manipulates what’s “trending”’, CBS News, 9 May 2016. Available online: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-trending-on-facebook-not-what-you-think-curatorsmanipulate-news/ (accessed 28 February 2017); Robert Scheer, They Know Everything about You: How Data Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy (New York: Nation Books, 2015), 103–32. JP 3:2951, pp. 317–18 / SKS 23, NB15:54, p. 37.

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by the Gospel. Because they have been so claimed, they have also been called as witnesses to the importance of free and truthful speaking. The contemporary church thus has every reason to be concerned with the potential of these cultural trends to undermine and twist the various forms of human communication that articulate all human communion. This suggests that it is part of the church’s mission to the world theologically to investigate these cultural trends in order to discern which aspects of these changes are harmless and which denude or enrich the life of all humans, not only of Christians, but all our fellow citizens. What, then, are the appropriate points of resistance to the emerging information architecture, and what would be the aim of resistance, theologically understood? Which individual and collective goods are threatened by these changing patterns of communication and communion?

VI. RE-ESTABLISHING COMMUNION IN THE WORD I hope it has by now become clear why I have suggested approaching the information society not as something brand new but as a development of patterns of communion and communication already well underway in Kierkegaard’s Denmark. His was an age, like ours, driven by an urge to accelerate the rapidity of written speech and to deprioritize the importance of physical presence in communication. Despite the cultural changes that we have seen these desires to have catalysed, many Christians have nevertheless enthusiastically greeted this change as a harbinger of unambiguously promising new modes of Christian communion. Some have suggested that in social media and other online activities ‘two or three’ in fact gather in more meaningful and transformational ways than is possible in traditional forms of ecclesial gathering.45 Many mainstream ecclesial movements are being attracted to the claim that the simultaneity of communion developed by constant texting and emailing is a better index of the quality of the church’s communion than simple physical gathering.46 Some churches have even encouraged texting and other electronic communications between pastor and congregation within services of worship to make them more interactive, though some of the limits of this article of faith are becoming evident as trendsetters in this movement have faltered.47 Kierkegaard understood the key theological questions about modern forms of public discourse would only emerge when Christians began to appreciate the modes and forms of communication as the crucial determinant of the quality of our being with each other and with God. This is why he never tired of insisting, Lappano notes, that ‘the life of the communicator matters, and not as some puritanical demand for “virtuous” or “upstanding” authors, but rather with respect to the degree that an author lives according to the life-view communicated’.48 Believing that living words are the Gospel’s basic form

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Tim Bednar, ‘We Know More Than Our Pastors: Why Bloggers Are the Vanguard of the Participatory Church’, e-church.com, 22 April 2004, 3, 39. PDF available online: https://www.scribd.com/document/47331/ We-Know-More-Than-Our-Pastors (accessed 17 June 2017). Pete Ward, Liquid Church (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2002), 88–9. The trend was anticipated by Kierkegaard. See Olli-Pekka Vainio, ‘Kierkegaard’s Eucharistic Spirituality ’, Theology Today 67 (2010): 15–23. This has become a regular feature at influential churches in the wider ‘emerging church’ movement in the United States and was pioneered by Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Notably, communication – in the form of problems of the maintenance of authority and the attempt to keep a ‘family’ atmosphere across thirteen sites of multiple hundreds of people, which became impossible the more corporatized it became – were some of the central weaknesses that led to the downfall of the Mars Hill Church when it disbanded in 2014. Lappano, ‘A Coiled Spring’, 786.

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Kierkegaard also believed that words that are mobile and responsive to particular people in particular places and times were the crux of the Gospel. This is why Jesus’s spoken words were more powerful than any media platform. In the end words can gain their gravity in relation to deeds and persons. The questions Kierkegaard raised about the emerging culture of the mass media were not only theologically motivated but also grounded more specifically in a theology of Jesus Christ as the Word of God. God’s word was spoken (simply communicated orally) by a single man and later was written down – nowadays any fool gets his rubbish printed in 1,000 and 10,000 copies. According to the mentality of our day one would think that God at least might have postponed being born until after the invention of printing, that before that it was not the fullness of time, and that he then would have gotten himself one, two, three highspeed presses. What a satire on the human race that God’s word was put into the world as it was! What a satire on the human race that everything grows worse and worse as communication and that by means of ever new inventions dissemination grows greater and greater!49 Given the angle of approach of this theological cultural criticism the French theologian Jacques Ellul has concluded, ‘Kierkegaard . . . shows with prophetic vigor the kind of noise we experience today, whose importance he had discerned: the racket of the city, of speed, of politics and revolution, the racket of the press and of advertising, “urban chattering and gossip, like a snowy whirlwind” – all this (and what would he say in our day!) utterly suffocates the word.’50 It was this concern with the suffocation of genuine communication as a deafness to God’s supreme Word that led Kierkegaard so vigorously to question the two central impulses animating the ongoing developments of our digital culture: the desires to increase speed and to de-emphasize the embodied aspects of communication. With remarkably clear foresight Kierkegaard articulated why the solution to this problem could not be more of the same but had to be different in kind. There will be no recipe for outwitting with the information society, no automatic mechanism that can be unleashed to re-create the forms of communication that have been displaced and distorted by our entry into networked lives. All such solutions Kierkegaard saw as no solution at all, Lappano observes: What will break up the destructive sociality of the crowd, of a divinized ‘we’ (whether in the guise of nation, race, class, etc.) is not some other newly defined ‘we that is I’, but the development of persons who are able to form ‘an ethical stance despite the whole world,’ and are capable of constructing ethical-religious life together (an ‘I’ that nevertheless knows the ‘we’ from which it comes, and that chooses itself into social life).51 The movement of the emerging mass society toward speed and disembodied communication worried Kierkegaard because he saw all faithful engagement in interpersonal communication to begin with a deep respect for the differences between people, the incommensurability and unfathomability of their inner lives. Lappano nicely encapsulates the conclusion Kierkegaard drew: ‘The task of personalized communication is not to

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JP 3:2889, p. 279 / SKS 24, NB24:66, p. 362. Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, trans. Joyce Main Hanks (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), 196. Lappano, ‘A Coiled Spring’, 793, quoting TA, 106.

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produce a public sensation, to disseminate, or to accumulate followers, but to enable others to grapple with the riddle that they themselves are and foster ethical life.’52 Genuine communication, whether ironic or direct, should invite people not to evade but to live the questions of their existence. To take up this different mode of communication, Kierkegaard suggests, drastically alters our relation to our neighbours. When we communicate with a ‘public’ we are not just talking to a greater number of people than we do when we talk to a single neighbour. This relation is grounded not in our relationship with the aggregate emotions of a crowd (even with the group that is the church) but in our relationship with the individual person who is not addressed at all if spoken about generally and abstractly. One person supremely can only be truly addressed concretely and personally: the Trinitarian God. If we grasp the absolute uniqueness and concreteness of communicating with God, we discover, Kierkegaard believes, our neighbours as persons whom we must also address not generically, but directly and personally. The moment we begin to communicate with ‘them’ in order to draw attention to ourselves we close off our interest in listening, so undermining the give and take of genuine communication that is essential if we are to draw individuals together as individuals to willingly and knowingly form consensus and communion among genuinely different people.53 This way of engaging in communication and communion differs in kind from the marketing imperative and the overwhelming incentives characteristic of the social media environment. To suggest that Christians, as empathetically attuned individuals, ought to desire to appear in Christian community or as community before the world is thus to raise sharp questions of the individualistic focus that characterizes the bulk of current social media culture, as Jesus rather prominently emphasized (Mt. 6.1-6; 27.14; Jn 5.31). If we take a step back into earlier eras of the church, we notice that Kierkegaard’s view has important precursors. The church fathers, for instance, felt liberated to dispense with the complicated technologies of memorization popular in late antiquity because they understood liturgy as their pedagogue; they believed that it impregnated them in a very bodily way by shaping their affect, will and rationality by the Word of Christ. Within these presuppositions, reading – especially reading Scripture – is understood as an act expressing a desire to hand one’s self over (traditio) to the communion of saints, to have one’s affections reoriented, not to possess or manipulate what has been handed down. Certainly it must be said that speed is an enemy of this ‘being claimed’ by God’s Word, which takes time in worship, a time that cannot and must not be rushed.54 The maxim lex orandi, lex credendi encapsulates the impulse of the earliest Christian theologians to ensure that silly or heretical claims about the Trinitarian God were submitted to testing in the ‘echo chamber’ of the universal church and the heavenly choir of angels as they praised God.55 The form of community that is communally singing the psalms in monastic community is not only a different technique of relation to Scripture, it is a markedly different way of relating to God and neighbour.

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Lappano, ‘A Coiled Spring’, 794. See Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens, trans. Margaret Kohl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 242–6; Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 281–3. Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 43–4. Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Singen und Sagen: Zur musisch-musikalischen Dimension der Theologie’, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionswissenschaft 42 (2004): 330–6.

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What Kierkegaard allows us to recover is the ancient Christian insight that the communication of Christ in the ecclesia through Word and sacrament, with its emphasis on the verbum externum and the genuine giving and receiving of one’s self in communion, is an invitation to Christians to learn to recognize and name deficient instances of communication.56 One of the gifts on offer to Christians struggling to be faithful in our digital age may well be the intensity of Kierkegaard’s reminder about how important it is to attend to why and how we communicate with one another and with non-believers. Having inherited ancient forms of speaking, reading and hearing allows us to receive and hand on Christian Scriptures and worship. In this handing-down and handing-on Christians are invited to appreciate ever anew what it means and the effort it takes to be reshaped as human beings: by listening closely, by rereading and digesting, by sitting under authoritative teachers and in being changed as hearers. Indeed, these are all disciplines that can only be corroded by the urge to speed and the downplaying of the bodily aspects of communication. In short, in worship our expectation to hear one another as part of a ‘crowd’ or ‘class’, and to expect to hear no more from one another than information, is decisively challenged. To survive as Christians in our digital society, believers will need to recover a thick theology of listening.57 We will also need places in which listening to other concrete persons is practiced and valued. Amid the constant maelstrom of change that is our digital age – and if we are to recognize and name as temptations the ever new iterations taken by the corrosive forms of address, irony and the will to display to which Kierkegaard has directed our attention – it will remain as necessary as it always was to attend with deadly seriousness to the place where Jesus Christ has promised to be present: in Christian worship, with its peculiar forms of communication and communion.

FURTHER READING Dreyfus, Hubert L. ‘Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present Age’. Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, no. 1 (1999): 96–109. Prosser, Brian T., and Andrew Ward. ‘Kierkegaard and the Internet: Existential Reflections on Education and Community ’. Ethics and Information Technology 2, no. 3 (September 2000): 167–80. Wannenwetsch, Bernd. ‘Communication as Transformation’. Studies in Christian Ethics 13, no. 1 (2000): 93–106.

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Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘Communication as Transformation’, Studies in Christian Ethics 13, no. 1 (2000): 93–106. See Stephen H. Webb, The Divine Voice: Christian Proclamation and the Theology of Sound (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004).

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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Kierkegaard, Theology and Literary Media ERIC ZIOLKOWSKI

INTRODUCTION Søren Kierkegaard, more than being exclusively a ‘philosopher’ or ‘theologian’, can be aptly characterized as a philosophical, theological, religious thinker who gives voice to his reflecting through the imaginative constructions of literary art. My purpose in this chapter is not to downplay or deny the primacy of the religious, theological and philosophical dimensions of Søren Kierkegaard but instead to consider his aesthetic authorship as the poetic, literary medium in which they inhere and through which those dimensions find expression. I am not casting Kierkegaard as any sort of throwback to the Boccaccian equation of poetry and theology as one and the same enterprise. Rather, in keeping with his stated predilection to think from rather than into existence, I am suggesting that one of the most distinctive aspects of Kierkegaard is that his philosophizing and theologizing are part and parcel with his devotion to literary creation and style, and are inextricably bound to his ‘living poetically [leve poetisk]’. This expression, introduced in his magister dissertation, prior to the commencement of his authorship, connotes for him ‘becoming clear and transparent to oneself, not in finite and egotistical self-satisfaction but in one’s absolute eternal validity’1 – hence his conviction that ‘a simple Christian lives far more poetically than many a brilliant intellectual’.2 In this chapter I shall first distinguish Kierkegaard’s literary-theological orientation from that of the late medieval writer Boccaccio, who equated theology with poetry. Then I shall consider Kierkegaard as a literary artist by first distinguishing him as a religious poet from the Romantic ideal of the poet-prophet and then examining his self-image as literary ‘weed’ and prose stylist, his literary rootedness in what has been called ‘horizontal’ culture and, finally, how what he called his own whole ‘literature in literature’ bears on future trajectories of theology – especially following its recent, so-called aesthetic ‘turn’.

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CI, 298 / SKS 1, 332. See further Sylvia Walsh, Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). CI, 280 / SKS 1, 316.

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I. LITERARY TRANSCENDENCE OF THE IMMANENT FRAME For Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), whom Kierkegaard did not evidently read,3 theology and poetry were so intimately related as to seem inseparable. On the authority of Aristotle’s claim that ‘poets’, meaning pagan poets, ‘are the first theologians’,4 Boccaccio submitted – with Dante in mind – ‘that theology and poetry may be said to be almost one thing when the subject is the same’, and hence ‘that theology is nothing else than a piece of God’s poetry’.5 This notion is akin to the universal literary theme of human history, or the world itself, as a ‘book’ authored by God.6 Nonetheless, despite the recent ‘turn’ of Christian theology ‘to aesthetics’,7 the medieval poetry-theology equation would lack traction today, in what Charles Taylor dubs our current Secular Age – the phrase that furnishes the title of his massive philosophical analysis of the present human condition. The human individual, having undergone what Taylor chronicles as the threefold ‘Great Disembedding’ from the social order, from the cosmos and from the human good, dwells now as the interiorized, ‘buffered self ’ within the disenchanted, secularized ‘immanent frame’ (over against a possible ‘transcendent’ world), finding ‘the idea of spirits, moral forces, causal powers with a purposive bent, close to incomprehensible’.8 The buffered self may experience its secular, immanent entrapment in any number of ways, two of which Taylor finds exemplified by prominent literary artists of the last several centuries: first, ‘in the form of regret and nostalgia’9 of the sort expressed in Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘God’s Funeral’ (stanzas 10–12); second, with ‘at least some search for spiritual meaning, and often towards God’, though ‘haunted by a sense that the universe might after all be as meaningless as the most reductive materialism describes’.10 To illustrate this latter experience, Taylor cites several representative poets and writers from a book by the poet Czesław Miłosz: William Blake, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Fyodor Dostoevsky, a list to which Taylor adds Miłosz himself. Both these experiences – the regretful, nostalgic experience of lost meaning and the haunted, anxious quest for meaning – crystallize the ‘Disinherited Mind’. This expression, adopted by Taylor via Miłosz from Erich Heller, refers to the modern condition that resulted from what Miłosz describes as ‘the Romantic crisis of European culture’ triggered by ‘the dichotomy between the world of scientific laws – cold, indifferent to human values – and man’s inner world’.11

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In all his journals, papers and writings, both published and unpublished, Kierkegaard mentions Boccaccio once by name, as the source of a one-sentence quotation that he copies from another, secondary source. See JP 5:5994, p. 374 / SKS 20, NB:182, p. 111, n.d. 1847. Giovanni Boccaccio, Life of Dante, trans. J. G. Nichols (London: Hesperus, 2002), 52 [chapter 10]. Boccaccio evidently has in mind Aristotle’s allusion to ‘ancient’ poets such as Homer as those who ‘first speculated about the gods’; Aristotle, The Metaphysics 1.3, lines 29–30, 983b, 2 vols, Greek/Latin parallel texts, trans. Hugh Tredennick (London: William Heinemann, 1933–5), vol. 1, 20–1. Boccaccio, Life of Dante, 52. See Eric Ziolkowski, ‘The Tale within a Tale as Universal Theme: A Comparative Consideration of Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Journey to the West’, in A Poetics of Translation: Between Chinese and English Literature, ed. David Jasper, Geng Youzhuang and Wang Hai (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 37–57, esp. 42–4. See, e.g., Kathryn Reklis, ‘Can Theology Be Postsecular? Aesthetics and Non-Triumphalist Theology ’, Journal of Religion 98, no. 3 (July 2018): 371–97 [371]. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 539. Ibid., 592. Ibid., 593. Erich Heller, ‘Goethe and the Idea of Scientific Truth’, in The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern Literature and Thought (1952), 4th edn (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1975), 3–34; Czesław Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, trans. Louis Iribarne (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984), 94; Taylor, A Secular Age, 593. Taylor fails to

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In the twentieth, final chapter of A Secular Age, where Taylor discusses people ‘who broke out of the immanent frame . . . through some kind of conversion’, one of the central findings, unsurprisingly, is that many of the most influential ‘converts’ of this sort were writers and artists: ‘Literature is one of the prime loci of expression of these newly discovered insights; newly-discovered because people come at them from out of the immanent order, either from the belief that this order is all there is, or at least from a powerful sense of the pressure that this order exerts on us all.’12 Representative examples Taylor examines include, among others, Dostoevsky, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, Hilaire Belloc, Charles Péguy, Flannery O’Connor, G. K. Chesterton and Václav Havel (not all of whom, we might note, were ‘converts’ in a strict, technical sense of the term, and at least one of whom explicitly denied any religious affiliation13). Taylor also alludes to such seminal Romantic predecessors as the Schlegel brothers and Novalis, whose insights prepared for ‘the post-Romantic intuition that art, in particular poetry, is a key element in [the] recovery’14 of a higher, aesthetic dimension of contemporary life. Miłosz, who certainly employed poetry as a medium to defy spiritual confinement by the immanent frame (not to mention also by the Nazis’ wartime occupation, and then by the communist government, of his native Poland), goes unmentioned in Taylor’s closing chapter. Yet one particular poem by Miłosz, ‘Either-Or’, epitomizes the effort to reconsecrate language as a means by which to express some sense of the transcendent within the finitude or immanence of language, in this case drawing upon Christian incarnational imagery. ‘If God incarnated himself in man, died and rose from the dead’, Miłosz writes, then all human activities warrant attention only to the extent that they acquire meaning as a consequence. We should contemplate this daily, nightly and yearly, he adds, and ever more strongly and deeply, and above all, we should think ‘about how human history is holy’, and how it absorbs all our deeds, which are recorded in writing forever, with nothing lost. Publicly we should ‘testify to the divine glory / With words, music, dance, and every sign’. Further, in response to such notions as that ‘what is proclaimed by Christianity is a fiction’, or that ‘the evolution of life is an accident’, or ‘that anybody who believes anything is mistaken’, Miłosz rejects the supposition that these must be accepted as options on the same level as religious belief: Not at all! Why either-or? For centuries men and gods have lived together.15 This is not the only place where Miłosz uses the formulation ‘either-or’ to indicate his resistance to being forced to choose between two particular either/or options whose

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mention Miłosz’s comment that Heller, born in 1911, corroborates the thesis advanced earlier by the Polish philosopher Stanisław Brzozowski (1878–1911). Taylor, A Secular Age, 728, 732. O’Connor, Taylor concedes, was ‘not admittedly a convert, but one who felt this pressure keenly’ (ibid., 732). Havel acknowledged having studied the Bible, and admitted to an affinity for the ‘Christian sentiment’, but insisted, ‘I accept the Gospel of Jesus as a challenge to go my own way’. Quoted by Richard L. Stanger, ‘Václav Havel: Heir to a Spiritual Legacy ’, Christian Century 107, no. 12 (11 April 1990), 368–70 [369]. Elsewhere, Havel denied ever undergoing a ‘genuine conversion, as I understand it’, meaning ‘replacing an uncertain “something” with a completely unambiguous personal God, and fully, inwardly, to accept Christ as the Son of God . . . I have not taken that step’. Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvížďala, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1990), 189. Taylor, A Secular Age, 755. Czesław Miłosz, ‘Either-Or’, from his Provinces (Dalsze okolice, 1993), in Miłosz, New and Collected Poems 1931–2001 (New York: Ecco, 2001), 540–1.

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framing as such he finds false or misleading.16 Yet there is no way to know whether in these instances he is consciously echoing Kierkegaard, who immortalized that expression and whose ‘philosophy’ Miłosz in another context says ‘grew out of the disintegrations occurring within Christianity’.17 Construed in this way, though unmentioned in A Secular Age, Kierkegaard’s authorship exemplifies Taylor’s characterization of literature as ‘one of the prime loci of expression’ for the buffered self, Taylor’s unwitting counterpart of Kierkegaard’s single individual, resisting the ‘pressure’ of existence in the immanent frame. In particular, the single individual must resist the stresses of ‘leveling’ as well as the social, cultural and religious hypocrisies of what Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms critiqued as modern bourgeois ‘paganism’ posing as ‘Christendom’. As I have elsewhere suggested, Kierkegaard’s very nature is literary, and ‘the literary Kierkegaard . . . exists largely in, or even as, a dialectic between his (and his pseudonyms’) reading of literature and his (and their) production of literature’.18 The appreciation of his literary merits began with Georg Brandes and has extended among a minority of Kierkegaard’s readers to today.19 Kierkegaard embodies homo litterarius (the literary human),20 someone whose humanity is defined and confirmed through writing. To be sure, he cannot be categorized tout court as a poet, novelist or story writer. Nor does he engage, as does Miłosz, in the (Catholic) sacramental project of sanctifying language itself, ‘publicly testify[ing] to the divine glory / With words … and every sign’. Yet he famously characterized himself with cryptic qualifications as ‘only a singular kind of poet’,21 or ‘hardly anything but a poet [næsten kun en Digter]’,22 one whose entire pseudonymous oeuvre comprises a ‘poet-production [Digter-Frembringelse]’.23 Further, his devotion to the theatre and opera, which he regularly attended, led him to contemplate ‘transform[ing] [his own “battle of ideas”] into poetic works [Digter-Værker], even putting it directly on stage as drama’.24 Indeed, his compulsion to engage in ‘creative writing’ is undeniable.

II. POET, NOT PROPHET Some comments made by Paul Tillich in 1963 about Kierkegaard’s attacks on the Christian church and theology furnish a useful context in which to consider the relationship between ‘literature’, including the ‘poetic’, and ‘theology’ as well as ‘philosophy’ in Kierkegaard. In Tillich’s view the image Kierkegaard presents of the church and theology seems a comic caricature, not a fair portrayal, exploiting the inherently paradoxical situation of both the Christian clergy and systematic theology. The minister’s position, especially

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E.g. in Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1981–82 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 52, Miłosz recalls having expressed, in a conversation with a Polish communist in Warsaw during the Second World War, ‘doubts as to [the communist’s] “either-or” . . . opinion [that] whoever wanted to resist Nazism effectively had no other choice than to accept the Soviet system completely’. Ibid., 107. Eric Ziolkowski, ‘Introduction’, in The Literary Kierkegaard, ed. Eric Ziolkowski (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 3–53 [37]. Portions of this present chapter are based on that introduction. See ibid., 33–6. See Eric Ziolkowski, ‘Introduction’, in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, ed. Eric Ziolkowski (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 3–36 [10]. WA, 165 / SKS 12, 281. OMWA, 18 / SKS 13, 25. PV, 86 / SKS 16, 65. KJN 8, p. 191 / SKS 24, NB22:164, p. 193, n.d. 1851.

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when its bourgeois aspects (professional career, marriage, child-rearing) are weighed against the task of proclaiming Jesus’s unearthly message, seems self-contradictory, as does the inevitability that sociological laws will influence the ministerial office and its servers. At the same time, theology seems paradoxical in its objectifying effort to assemble an all-encompassing, well-fashioned system of the existential paradox. The problem, Tillich maintained, is that Christianity stands ‘vertically’ in relation to everything that constitutes culture. It might seem that Christianity should be extracted from all cultural relationships, yet this would be impossible, because the language necessary to accomplish such an extraction is culturally dependent. Yet, were Christianity to lose its ‘vertical’ orientation and become merely a ‘segment’ of the culture around it, as the advocates of Cultural Protestantism tended to regard their religion, the paradox would vanish and Christianity would cease to exist. In Tillich’s view, this conflict is permanent, and was no less real and insoluble in the 1960s than it had been for Kierkegaard. ‘Since in Denmark at Kierkegaard’s time there was a sophisticated theology of mediation’, a theology designed to correlate Christian faith with modern intellectual tendencies, the prophetic voice could hardly be heard any more. Kierkegaard became the prophetic voice. The prophet always speaks from the vertical dimension and does not care about what happens in the horizontal dimension. But then Kierkegaard became a part of the horizontal; he became the father of the existentialist philosophy, of neoorthodox theology, and of much depth psychology. Thus he was taken into culture . . . So out of the vertical there comes a new horizontal line, that is, a new cultural actualization of the prophetic word. This cannot be avoided.25 The image of Kierkegaard as a ‘prophet . . . speak[ing] from the vertical dimension’ might seem consistent with his claims to being a ‘kind of poet’. Symptomatic of the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, the notion of the poet as prophet, or of the poet-prophet, was espoused during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by, among others, Hamann and Schelling in Germany; Rimbaud in France; Blake, Wordsworth and Carlyle in Great Britain; and Whitman in the United States.26 The conflating of the poetic and prophetic by the Romantics was concomitant with their exaltation, or even deification, of the imagination over the senses, a tendency epitomized by any number of Blake’s aphorisms – for example: ‘Man is All Imagination. God is Man & exists in us & we in him’;27 ‘The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination, that is, God himself . . . It manifests itself in his Works of Art (In Eternity All is Vision)’.28 The conflation of the poet and prophet persisted long after the waning of Romanticism. An 1898 issue of The Biblical World, an American scholarly journal, includes an article on ‘The Prophet as Poet’, whose author cites the Hebrew prophets to illustrate that ‘poet and prophet [are] one’: the prophets typically ‘gave forth their prophetic utterances in the common Hebrew measure . . . not our modern word-rhyme, but sense-parallelism, or

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Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought from Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, ed. Carl E. Braaten (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 474. See M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973). William Blake, ‘Annotations to Berkeley’s Siris’ (1744), in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ‘newly revised edition’, ed. David V. Erdman, commentary by Harold Bloom (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1988), 663–4 [664]. William Blake, ‘The Laocoön’, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, 272–5 [273]. See Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 30.

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“rhyme of idea”, in balanced clauses’; poet and prophet alike are ‘concerned with truth’; ‘are seers’; are concerned with ‘the universal, the ideal’ and ‘eternal’; deal with ‘spiritual verity’ and ‘the sublime’; and are ‘lovers of freedom’.29 Several decades later, in his study of the religious dimensions of the arts, Gerardus van der Leeuw stated, ‘The poet . . . controls the power of the world’, and hence ‘stands in close relation to the prophet. The word which he speaks is not the product of himself, but is a power which surpasses him, which he sets in motion.’30 Does Kierkegaard fit the poet-prophet type? The construal of Kierkegaard as prophet is understandable in view of his deep, traumatic, lasting impact upon the established Danish Church, whose development from 1855 up through Tillich’s time was bound up with the ecclesiastical efforts to respond to Kierkegaard’s polemics.31 The perception of Kierkegaard as ‘ahead of his time’,32 and the opinion that he only belatedly ‘became a part of the horizontal’, led to the platitude, early expressed by Alec Vidler, that Kierkegaard ‘belongs to the twentieth rather than to the nineteenth century’, credited as he is ‘with responsibility for . . . “existentialism” and with having given a decisive impetus to the “theology of crisis” ’33 following the First World War. In further ascribing Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘atheistic existentialism’ to Kierkegaard’s impact, Vidler observes ‘that Sartre, like Kierkegaard, holding that the problems of life and morality do not lend themselves to abstract theorizing, finds that the best vehicles for conveying his message are not philosophical treatises, but the drama, the novel, and the diary’34 – all, notably, literary media. Tillich’s earlier characterization of Kierkegaard as a ‘prophetic voice’ foreshadowed others’ similar perceptions of him. Malcolm Muggeridge in the mid-1970s pronounced him ‘one of the oddest prophets’.35 Recently, Kyle Roberts heralded him as possessing a ‘prophetic, alternative consciousness’,36 ‘a kind of prophet’ whose ‘ “proto-postmodernist” prophetic voice’ resonates with the concerns of ‘emergent’ Christians as a ‘postmodern people of God’,37 although a (now deceased) Danish Seventh-Day Adventist theologian several years ago wondered whether Kierkegaard’s ‘prophetic messages’ were ‘sidetracked’ by the ‘emphasis placed on his . . . existentialism’.38 It was during the same period that Louis Mackey and Sylvia Walsh published their important studies of Kierkegaard as poet.39 Despite these parallel approaches to Kierkegaard as prophet and poet, however, Kierkegaard would have surely declined to don the mantle of a charismatic prophet in

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34 35 36

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Edward B. Pollard, ‘The Prophet as a Poet’, The Biblical World 12, no. 5 (1898): 327–32. Gerardus van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art [1963], trans. D. E. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 122. F. J. [Frederik Julius] Billeskov Jansen, ‘L’heritage de Kierkegaard dans les pays Nordiques’, Cahiers du Sud 50, no. 371 (April–May 1963): 18–27 [18]. See Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), xvii. Alec R. Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution: 1789 to the Present Day (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961; rev. 1974), 201. Ibid., 322. Malcolm Muggeridge, A Third Testament (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 119. Kyle Roberts, Emerging Prophet: Kierkegaard and the Postmodern People of God (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2013), 10. Ibid., 2. Borge Schantz, ‘200th Anniversary of Soren Kierkegaard: Was He Also a Prophetic Voice?’, Adventist Today, 2013. Available online: https://atoday.org/200th-anniversary-of-soren-kierkegaard-was-he-also-a-propheticvoice/ (accessed 16 June 2018). Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971); Walsh, Living Poetically.

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the scriptural sense or of a Romantic poet-prophet. He often claimed to write as a poet40 but repeatedly emphasized that he was ‘without authority [uden Myndighed]’,41 meaning he was not an ordained minister, appointed teacher or recipient of a special calling – such as a prophet or some kindred figure. For Kierkegaard, nothing would be more comical than someone without a divine vocation claiming a prophetic status. Did not Ludwig Tieck’s novella, Der Junge Tischlermeister (‘The young master carpenter’) (1836), tell ‘about a man who quit drinking but who then soon believed that he was a prophet’?42 Kierkegaard’s understanding of the prophetic was rooted in the biblical representation of prophecy43 rather than in the Romantics’ aesthetic appropriation of the concept. Even when thinking ironically of ‘someone wanting to stage a presentation of the falsity of the age’ to an audience incapable of comprehending the message, he recognized as a biblical exemplum for that scenario the prophet’s warning to David, ‘Thou art the man, O King!’44 In his dissertation Kierkegaard anticipates his pseudonym Johannes Climacus’s incorporation of Carl Daub’s distinction between the prophet as ‘a historian of the future’ and the historian as ‘a prophet of the past’.45 For Kierkegaard, ‘the prophetic individual . . . spies the new in the distance’, yet ‘does not possess the future – he only has a presentiment of it’ but ‘is also lost to the actuality to which he belongs’. By contrast, ‘for the ironic subject, the given actuality has lost its validity entirely’, becoming ‘for him an imperfect form that is a hindrance everywhere’.46 The ironist is prophetic, but his position and situation are the reverse of the prophet’s. The prophet walks arm in arm with his age, and from this position he glimpses what is coming. The prophet is lost to his generation, but essentially that is the case only because he is preoccupied with his visions. The ironist, however, has stepped out of line with his age, has turned around and faced it . . . [T]he actuality he so antagonistically confronts is what he must destroy; upon this he focuses his burning gaze.47 This passage portrays the antagonistic ironist, the Socratic gadfly, that Kierkegaard actually became. On this point, and regarding Kierkegaard’s self-image as poet, it is important to be mindful of Kierkegaard’s existential identification of the poet with the ironist – for example, ‘The more the poet has abandoned [the immediacy of genius], the more necessary it is for him to have a totality-view of the world and in this way to be master over irony in his individual existence, and,’ as with Kierkegaard qua poetironist, ‘the more necessary it becomes for him to be a philosopher to a certain degree.’48 Meanwhile, despite Tillich’s support, anyone dead-set on construing Kierkegaard as a ‘prophet’ should recall Kierkegaard’s own ridiculing, in 1846, of the ‘extraordinary quantity of prophecies [Prophetier], apocalypses, signs, and insights in our age when so little is being done’ and his ensuing attestation, saturated with irony:

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Aside from quotations above from his published writings, see, e.g., JP 6:6256, p. 61 / SKP X 6 B 40, p. 49, n.d. 1848[?]–9; KJN 5, p. 351 / SKS 21, NB10:169, p. 340, n.d. 1849. E.g. BA, Suppl., 311 / SKP VII 2 B 235, p. 144; and also JP 6:6256, p. 61 / SKP X 6 B 40, p. 49, n.d. 1848[?]–9; and WA, 165 / SKS 12, 281. JP 4:4388, p. 273 / SKS 27, Papir 146, p. 137, 6 June 1836. KJN 2, p. 12 / SKS 18, EE:33, p. 16, 9 March 1839. KJN 1, pp. 44–5 / SKS 17, AA:45 and AA:45a, p. 51, n.d. 1837. Carl Daub, ‘Die Form der christlichen Dogmen- und Kirchen-Historie’, Zeitschrift für speculative Theologie, ed. Bruno Bauer, 1, no. 1 (1836): 1–60 [1]; ASKB 354–7; cf. PF, 80 / SKS 4, 279. CI, 260–1 / SKS 1, 298–9. CI, 261 / SKS 1, 298–9; emphasis in SKS text but not in CI. CI, 325 / SKS 1, 353.

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I do have the unencumbered advantage over the others’ burdensome responsibility to prophesy and forebode that I can be rather sure no one will dream of believing what I say . . . I remain just a prophet in the modern sense, for a modern prophet prophesies something, nothing more. Of course, in a certain sense a prophet can do no more. It was Governance, after all, who ordained fulfillment of the ancient prophets’ predictions; we modern prophets, [are] lacking the endorsement of Governance.49 Kierkegaard’s differentiation between prophet and poet would identify the prophet with the ‘vertical’ dimension of which Tillich speaks and the poet with the ‘horizontal’. This distinction is consistent with the Greek etymological roots of the two terms as well as, tellingly, with the instructively ultra-religious distinction drawn between their Arabic equivalents in the Qur’ān. In the Greek, ποιητής (poet), denoting a maker, constructor or inventor (i.e. the Aristotelian understanding of the term that underlies Kierkegaard’s own50), is antithetical to a προφήτης (prophet), denoting an interpreter of oracular pronouncements or one who speaks for a god and interprets his or her will to human beings. The Qur’ān, in professing to impart God’s final revelations to humanity through Muḥammad, is even more emphatic on the distinction between poet (sha’ir) and prophet (nabiyy) or messenger (rasul). Some of the Meccan suras betray a hypersensitivity to the common charge that Muḥammad dreamed up or fabricated the qur’ānic revelations in the same way poets fabricate their poems. While his detractors dismissed him as ‘only a poet’ (cf. Kierkegaard’s self-description!) who communicated ‘confused dreams’ or ‘invented them’,51 or as a downright ‘insane poet’52 heading for ‘an adverse turn of fortune’,53 the Qur’ān reveals ‘indeed the word of the noble Messenger, / And not the word of a poet’54: ‘As for the poets, only those who go astray follow them.’55 Kierkegaard had no direct exposure to the Qur’ān, but his indirect acquaintance with it, through its treatment in Goethe’s East-West Divan, resulted in one brief but revealing journal entry of 1849, where he recognizes his inverse relationship as a non-prophetic poet to the non-poetic Islamic prophet: ‘Mohammed protests with all his might against being regarded as a poet and the Koran as a poem; he wants to be a prophet. I protest with all my might at being regarded as a prophet and want only to be a poet.’56 Kierkegaard’s ‘protest’ here is consistent not only with Climacus’s caution against confusing poetic authority with religious authority57 but also with Kierkegaard’s contemplation of the theological problematics inherent in the controversial claim by Pastor Adolph Peter Adler (1812–1869) to having experienced a revelation-like ‘vision’.58 In this view, the refusal by Kierkegaard to pose as a prophet makes all the clearer that to invoke him

49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

57 58

TA, 105–6 / SKS 8, 100. See Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, ‘Historical Introduction’, FT, xxiii. Qur’ān 21:5. Hereafter all English renderings are from Al-Qur’ān: A Contemporary Translation, trans. Ahmed Ali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984; 2nd rev. edn, 1988). Qur’ān 37:36. Qur’ān 52:30. Qur’ān 69:40–41. Qur’ān 26:224. KJN 5, p. 294 / SKS 21, NB10:52 and 52a, p. 283. In the margin Kierkegaard cites Goethe’s Westöstlicher Divan, a copy of which he owned (ASKB 1641–68). This is not to ignore the traditional Muslim claim, encouraged by the Qur’ān itself (e.g. 17:88), that the Qur’ān constitutes the highest, peerless work of Arabic literature. CUP, 441n / SKS 7, 401n. See BA, passim / SKS 15, 89–295.

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as a prophet, or to try to try to parlay his writings to some ‘prophetic’ effect, would be to defy his own disclaimer and to mistake his literary art for some sort of sibylline craft. If the literary Kierkegaard is to be of value in future trajectories of theology, it will not be as any sort of prophet or poet-prophet.

III. KIERKEGAARD’S LITERARY ROOTEDNESS IN THE CULTURAL-HORIZONTAL Despite Tillich, Vidler, and the tendency to regard Kierkegaard as a philosopher, theologian, quasi-prophetic agent of the ‘vertical dimension’, and also a proto-existentialist, proto-postmodernist, proto-deconstructionist and so forth, Kierkegaard never needed – pace Tillich – to ‘[become] part of the horizontal’ and to be ‘taken into culture’. Rather, he was rooted there all along as a literary artist, albeit one whose art served not only aesthetic but also philosophical, ethical, theological and ultimately religious purposes. He was, as the Devil in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) so memorably describes him, ‘the Christian in love with aesthetics [der in Aesthetik verliebte Christen]’.59 Absent in the time of Mann and Tillich was a general recognition of this fact, presumably because Kierkegaard was so extremely rare, if not unique, as a philosophical and theological thinker both in the extent to which he was influenced by literature and the arts, and in how he wrote as a literary artist. The late Nathan A. Scott, Jr, a pioneering exponent of the academic area known as theology and literature in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s (later renamed religion and literature), observed several decades ago, ‘Certainly Western philosophy . . . has only very rarely permitted itself to be fructified by the poetic imagination’: Kierkegaard and John Henry Newman were perhaps the sole exceptions in ‘hav[ing] been influenced in any decisive way by poetic methods and modalities’ and in taking literature and the arts ‘to be fecundating materials for theological reflection’, rather than employing them – as did Berdyaev, Jacques Maritain and Tillich himself – mainly as ‘barometers of the cultural situation requiring to be addressed by Christian theology’.60 At the same time, as F. J. Billeskov Jansen observed in the 1950s, most readers of Kierkegaard concentrate so closely on his thought that they overlook how much attention he devoted to literary construction and style.61 Henning Fenger, taking his own ‘literary approach’ to Kierkegaard a year after Tillich made his statement quoted above, remarks likewise, ‘Among the many existing Kierkegaards there is one who is little known even in Scandinavia – Søren Kierkegaard, the man of letters.’ This literary Kierkegaard is ‘not an isolated phenomenon, a genius fallen from the sky . . . He is a genuine product of a well-defined literary milieu, the Copenhagen of the 1830’s and the 1840’s’, the

59

60

61

Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn erzählt von einem Freund, in Mann, Gesammelte Werke, 12 vols (1960–74), vol. 6, 322. Eng.: Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told By a Friend, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Random House, 1971), 242. Nathan A. Scott, Jr, The Poetics of Belief: Studies in Coleridge, Arnold, Pater, Santayana, Stevens, and Heidegger (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 11, 171n50. See also Nathan A. Scott, Jr, Negative Capability: Studies in the New Literature and the Religious Situation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 26. Scott had been a colleague of Tillich at the University of Chicago and was considerably influenced by him. F. J. Billeskov Jansen, ‘The Literary Art of Kierkegaard’, trans. Margaret Grieve, in A Kierkegaard Critique, ed. Howard A. Johnson and Niels Thulstrup (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 11–21.

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period of Andersen, Grundtvig, among other superlative writers and poets – Denmark’s Golden Age.62 Kierkegaard proved an irrepressible adherent to what Billeskov Jansen describes as the ‘veritable cult of the art of writing, both in prose and poetry’,63 in Golden Age Denmark. His pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, while declining the title of poet (Digter),64 was conceptualized by Kierkegaard as ‘a poetic [i.e. experimental, imaginatively “made”] person who exists only among poets’.65 All the pseudonyms are indeed ‘poets’ inasmuch as they engage in what Climacus calls ‘imaginary construction [Experimentet]’,66 an activity he attributes to Lessing, though Lessing never seems to have used the term.67 Many entries in the journals and papers spell out what ‘imaginary construction’ and ‘imaginatively constructing [experimenterende]’ involve, reflecting an epistemology and philosophy of art derived from Aristotle, Plato, Lessing and Kierkegaard’s own thinking.68 Howard and Edna Hong summarize as follows the view these entries afford of the poet and the poet’s task: The task of the poet includes the philosophic task of casting private and shared experience into reflection, of penetrating it and grasping its internal coherence and meaning, the universally human. History and actuality are thereby transcended, and thus poetry, as well as all art, science, and philosophy, deals only with possibility, ‘not in the sense of an idle hypothesis but possibility in the sense of ideal actuality’. Therefore the poet is ‘one who makes’, who construes, constructs, and composes hypotheses as do philosophers and scientists. What distinguishes the poet is a kind of imagination that shapes the possibles [sic] in palpable form, in the form of ‘ideal actuality’. The poet’s mode is not the discursive, demonstrative, didactic [docerende] mode of the scientist and philosopher or the strict narrative mode of the historian. His mode is that of imaginative construction in the artistic illusion of actuality, or, to borrow a phrase from Climacus in Fragments, it is to construct imaginatively or to hypothesize in concreto rather than to use the scientific and philosophic mode of abstraction in his presentation.69 While in his time the term ‘poet’ generally connoted ‘writer of literary texts’,70 Kierkegaard expanded or transcended that connotation by pursuing the role of ‘imaginative constructor’ (Experimentator). This Kierkegaardian type, the Hongs point out, ‘makes or fashions the various pseudonyms, poetic imaginative constructors, who in turn imaginatively shape characters, scenes, situations, and relations expressive in various ways of the hypothesis(es) informing the work’.71 The multivoicedness or Bakhtinian polyphony of Kierkegaard’s authorship, which enables the manifold subjectivities of the pseudonyms to express themselves, accords with Climacus’s celebrated pronouncement

62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70

71

Henning Fenger, ‘Kierkegaard – A Literary Approach’, Scandinavica 3, no. 1 (1964): 1–16 [1]. Billeskov Jansen, ‘The Literary Art of Kierkegaard’, 1. FT, 90 / SKS 4, 180. JP 5:5660, p. 232 / SKP IV B 79, n.d. 1843. CUP, 617 / SKS 7, 560. See CUP, 64 / SKS 7, 66, and also the draft-fragment, SKP VI B 98:21. See also the Hongs, ‘Historical Introduction’, FT, xxiv. See the Hongs’ note to the subtitle of R, 357–62. Hongs, ‘Historical Introduction’, FT, xxiv–xxv. Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 139, 151. Hongs, ‘Historical Introduction’, FT, xxv.

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that truth is subjectivity and also with Lessing’s famous suspicion that if God were to offer him the choice between grasping all truth and striving ever after truth, he would choose the latter option, believing that pure truth is for God alone.72 In other words, ‘Let everyone say what seems to him truth, and let truth itself be commended to God.’73 Kierkegaard sought to distance himself from the pseudonymous authorship by insisting that he related to it as an ‘editor’, ‘souffleur’ (prompter) and ‘reader’,74 and thus that it would be wrong for persons quoting his pseudonyms to ascribe the quotations to him. Reflecting Kierkegaard’s acute awareness of the formal challenges posed by the use of multiple voices and pseudonyms, Victor Eremita, the fictive ‘editor’ of Either/Or (1843), acknowledges such ‘difficulties’ by noting that the ‘aesthetic’ author of the various essays, treatises and other papers that constitute Either/Or’s first part declares himself not its author but only its editor: ‘This is an old literary device’, related, we might add, to the universal literary theme of the tale within a tale,75 ‘to which I would not have much to object if it did not further complicate my own position, since one author becomes enclosed within the other like the boxes in a Chinese puzzle’.76 In accord with the different existential stages and phases they represent, and also with their divergent theological and philosophical dispositions, the different pseudonyms naturally seek expression through variegated literary forms. An inevitable consequence of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymity or polyonymity is therefore what George Pattison describes, adopting another term from Bakhtin, as the ‘exceptionally carnivalesque multiplicity of genres’ that comprise Kierkegaardian authorship, a literary ‘kaleidoscope’.77 The journals and papers from the 1830s and 1840s record any number of ideas and plans for, and sometimes sketches and incomplete drafts of, stories, novels, dramas and other assorted literary-artistic writing projects, the most fully developed of which is an Aristophanic burlesque play Kierkegaard penned during his student years.78 Moreover, consistent with occasional hints by the pseudonyms, different scholars and commentators read some of the pseudonymous writings as novels79; ascribe a ‘theatrical form’ to the whole pseudonymous corpus, particularly Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846)80; or find the entire authorship, particularly Repetition (1843), functioning as a ‘theater of ideas’.81 Still, the fact remains, Kierkegaard wrote none of his published works for the stage or as a traditional novel. ‘Kierkegaard did not deliver novels or plays or poems,’ says Edward Mooney, ‘but he easily could have. He had other fish to fry.’82 72

73 74 75 76 77

78

79

80

81

82

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Eine Duplik (1778), sec. 1, in Werke und Briefe, 12 vols, ed. Wilfried Barner et al. (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003), vol. 8, 510. Lessing, Letter 1358, 6 April 1778, to Johann Albrecht Heinrich Reimarus, in Werke und Briefe, vol. 12, 144. For references and discussion see Ziolkowski, The Literary Kierkegaard, 22–3. See Ziolkowski, ‘The Tale within a Tale as Universal Theme’, 37–57. EO1, 8–9 / SKS 2, 16. George Pattison, ‘The Bonfire of the Genres: Kierkegaard’s Literary Kaleidoscope’, in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, ed. Ziolkowski, 39–53 [45]. KJN 1, pp. 272–89 / SKS 17, DD:208, pp. 280–97, n.d. 1837. See also Ziolkowski, The Literary Kierkegaard, 28–9, 62–3, 84–5; and Pattison, ‘The Bonfire of the Genres’, 45–7. On Either/Or and Practice in Christianity as novels, see Pattison, ‘The Bonfire of the Genres’, 46–7; and Joakim Garff, ‘Kierkegaard’s Christian Bildungsroman’, in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, ed. Ziolkowski, 85– 95. See also Ziolkowski, The Literary Kierkegaard, 29–30. Howard Pickett, ‘Beyond the Mask: Kierkegaard’s Postscript as Antitheatrical, Anti-Hegelian Drama’, in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, ed. Ziolkowski, 99–114. Martijn Boven, ‘A Theater of Ideas: Performance and Performativity in Kierkegaard’s Repetition’, in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, ed. Ziolkowski, 115–29. Edward F. Mooney, ‘Kierkegaard’s Disruptions of Literature and Philosophy ’, in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, ed. Ziolkowski, 55–69 [56]; emphasis in original.

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IV. ‘A WEED IN LITERATURE’ ‘I am a weed in literature [Ukrudt i Litteraturen],’ writes Kierkegaard in a journal entry of 1838, the year his first published work appeared, ‘but still I am at least the one they call “Good King Henry”.’83 In accord with the organic aesthetics that originated in Aristotle and gained prominence with German theorists in the late eighteenth century,84 this association of himself with the rampant growth and proliferation of actual weeds anticipates analogies Kierkegaard draws in his early writings between botanical images and various literary phenomena.85 Amid ‘the abundance of thoughts and ideas’ that, he attested, pressured their way forth in his mind like increased milk in a cow’s udder,86 many were for projects of a literary-artistic nature, none of which were ever realized. It seems quite possible that frustration over his unfulfilled ideas for literary creation may explain why his first, signed published work, From the Papers of One Still Living (1838),87 constitutes a scathing assessment of the already successful, ‘upcoming’ writer Hans Christian Andersen’s third novel, Only a Fiddler (Kun en Spillemand, 1837). The criticism of Andersen by the young Kierkegaard as lacking the kind of ‘life-view’ essential to any novelist’s success adumbrates Kierkegaard’s late-life dismissal of modern literature as a ‘strange’, ‘empty racket’.88 Nonetheless, in 1846 Kierkegaard published a signed critical review of another contemporary novel, Mrs (Thomasine) Gyllembourg’s Two Ages (To Tidsaldre, 1845). Together, this review – his second and last one – and the Andersen review form a pair of ‘aesthetic’, literary-critical bookends that frame the bulk of his pseudonymous output.89 In his two testimonials, On My Work as an Author (1851) and The Point of View for My Work as an Author (published posthumously, 1859), Kierkegaard maintains that his authorship began with Either/Or.90 Yet his 1838 self-description as a literary weed already betrayed a confidence in his ability to produce a prolific literary oeuvre. Through the midand late-1830s the stylistic and formal groundwork for his authorship was already being prepared. Billeskov Jansen finds Kierkegaard to have been writing in two distinct styles during those formative years. The first, ‘stilted style’, was for public usage, as in his debut literary effort, an ironical article of 1834 on women’s intellectual capacities, or later, in From the Papers of One Still Living. His other style, ‘a simple and inspired language’, is employed in his journal: ‘As early as 1835 this personal style, vivacious and poetic, was fully developed; that is to say, when not preoccupied with writing about literature or the public but with his own future, his vocation, and his whole spiritual life, Kierkegaard was already a master of language, a writer, and artist.’91 This latter style, which Billeskov Jansen suggests is the one Kierkegaard began to use publicly about 1841, is the same language Joakim Garff finds in Kierkegaard’s letters to Regine from September 1840 to

83 84

85 86 87 88 89

90 91

KJN 2, p. 98 / SKS 18, FF:165, p. 107. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 184–225. For examples, see Ziolkowski, The Literary Kierkegaard, 323n73. KJN 1, p. 221 / SKS 17, DD:28c, p. 230, n.d. 1837. FPOSL, 53–102 / SKS 1, 7–57. KJN 9, p. 180 / SKS 25, NB27:66, p. 179, n.d. 1853. See Aage Henriksen, ‘Kierkegaard’s Reviews of Literature’, in Kierkegaard Symposium, ed. Steffen Steffensen and Hans Sörensen, Orbis litterarum, Tome 10, fasc. 1–2 (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1955), 75–83. See OMWA, 5, 12 / SKS 13, 12, 18; PV, 23 / SKS 16, 11. Billeskov Jansen, ‘The Literary Art of Kierkegaard’, 11–12. The referenced article, ‘Another Defense of Woman’s Great Abilities’, published under the pseudonym ‘A’, is found in EPW, 3–4 / SKS 14, 9–10.

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October the next year: ‘The creaking Latin syntax . . . is here replaced by an enchanting suppleness that makes the lines take wing. Displaying delicacy and rhythm, the letters bring inspired adoration to their subject matter, drawing on images and metaphors and poetic allusions to [a host of Danish literary masters]. These letters are not ordinary communication; they are art.’92 Matching the ‘artistic’ style of Kierkegaard is his self-conception as ‘poet’, though he always acknowledges his unusualness as such. In the late autumn of 1841, after he terminated his engagement with Regine Olsen, fled Copenhagen to Berlin and began drafting Either/Or there, he confides to his friend Emil Boesen that, while able to ‘turn anything into a poetic [digte] subject’, he cannot and will not do so with practical affairs, matters ‘of duty, obligation, responsibility, debts, etc.’93 That winter, acknowledging his difficulty in ‘steer[ing] between the esthetic and ethical’, he states, ‘I hold my life poetically [digterisk] in my hand, but from this follows that which I cannot get away from: that between two poetic possibilities, that of actuality and contingency.’94 By the time he composed Stages on Life’s Way (1845), Kierkegaard apparently questioned whether the poetic and the religious were ultimately compatible. In the margin of a discarded portion of the part of Stages entitled ‘ “Guilty?”/“Not Guilty”?’ by the religious pseudonym Frater Taciturnus, this comment appears: ‘My interest is not to be a poet but to make out the meaning of the religious.’95 In 1848 he continues to qualify his self-identification as a poet, acknowledging that ‘dialectic is the inborn bent of [his] nature’,96 and that he works from a ‘religiously oriented background’ and ‘definite religiousness’.97 ‘Christianly understood [Christelig betragtet],’ specifies Anti-Climacus the next year as the pseudonym of Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death (1849), ‘every poet-existence . . . is sin [er … enhver Digter-Existents Synd], the sin of poetizing instead of being, of relating to the good and the true through the imagination instead of being.’98 At last, near death, Kierkegaard betrays a desire to discard his poet’s mantle – though he never fully renounces it. In one of his signed diatribes of 1855 against ‘official Christianity’, he admits to have been ‘passing [himself] off as a poet’, advancing ideals ‘in the name of being a poet’, while meanwhile ‘something was hiding behind this poet – the method was that of a detective [Politie-Klogskabens: literally, police intelligence] in order to make those in question feel safe’. Like Prospero casting down his book, though with no mention of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, he adds, ‘Then this poet suddenly changed: he – . . . threw away his guitar and – took out . . . The New Testament.’99 In another polemic he justifies his self-assigned role as a sleuth disguised as a poet in a society where the poet is deemed ‘in a godly sense . . . the most dangerous of all’, and yet, What is much more dangerous is that the person who is only a poet, by being, as it is called, a pastor, passes himself off as being something much more earnest and true than the poet, and yet is only a poet. This is hypocrisy to the second power. Therefore a

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 179. Letter, 16 November 1841, LD, 93 / SKS 28, 147. Letter, 16 January 1842, to Emil Boesen, LD, 122–3 / SKS 28, 159. JP 5:5722, p. 252 / SKP V B 148:5, n.d. 1844. KJN 5, p. 44 / SKS 21, NB6:62, p. 45. PV, 84 / SKS 16, 63. Published posthumously, PV was mostly written in 1848. SUD, 77 / SKS 11, 191. TM, 129–30 / SKS 13, 173–4.

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detective talent [Politi-Talent] was needed, someone who simply . . . by claiming to be only a poet, could get behind all this disguise.100 In his late years, Kierkegaard further qualifies his identification with the poetic, claiming that his ‘entire esthetic production was taken into custody by the religious; the religious put up with this emptying out of the poetic’.101 However, as Walsh shows, Kierkegaard never quits pursuit of his ideal of ‘living poetically’. He originally used this phrase to describe the purely aesthetic effort by the German Romantics to live in that manner, with an ironic, negative, unserious attitude towards reality, as they created works of art. Yet he subsequently reconceives the idea of ‘living poetically’ within ethical and religious frameworks as an existential mode ‘that affirms both possibility and actuality, a sense of our historical situatedness and finite limitations as well as freedom, and the construction of human personality . . . in relation to the infinite and the divine’.102 By 1849, Kierkegaard can claim of his lifelong vocation: ‘I set forth what Xnty [i.e. Christianity] is . . . I do this in partly poetic form’.103 This crucial point helps to explain why Kierkegaard, while disclaiming a prophet’s status, never fully renounced his claim to being a poet – or, more precisely, a religious poet. The year before his death, he advances his loftiest complement to that claim. Unwittingly harking back to Boccaccio’s notion of theology as ‘a piece of God’s poetry’, and anticipating Picasso’s remark that ‘God is in reality nothing but another artist [otro artista]’,104 he likens God to a poet and, in doing so, dissociates God from God’s creations or ‘productions’ in the same way that he, Kierkegaard, has dissociated himself as poet from his own authorship: God is like a poet . . . The poet is related in the same way to his poetic productions (also called his creations). But just as it is a mistake to think that what a particular character in a poem says or does represents the poet’s personal opinion, so it is a mistake to assume that God consents to all that happens and how.105 While this God-poet simile betokens Kierkegaard’s highest estimation of the poet’s vocation to which he laid claim, and while his former professor Hans Lassen Martensen quipped that Kierkegaard never concealed his ‘pretensions not only to the unbelievable claim of being one of the world’s greatest thinkers (and perhaps the greatest of them) but also to being one of the greatest poets’,106 the fact remains: Kierkegaard never did compose poetry in the strict sense; he wrote only prose. Yet he took pride in his ‘lyrical’ prose style, in which he felt able to produce ‘a more powerful lyric effect than in verse’.107 From his youth onwards, in keeping with Buffon’s adage that Le style est l’homme même, which

100 101 102 103

104 105 106

107

TM, 226 / SKS 13, 283; emphasis in original. PV, 85 / SKS 16, 64. Walsh, Living Poetically, 2. KJN 6, p. 250 / SKS 22, NB12:175, p. 248. These points are notably overlooked by Hans Urs von Balthasar when he speaks of Kierkegaard’s ‘banishment of the aesthetic from the realm of theology’ and claims that Kierkegaard’s ‘major failing’ is ‘the separation between aesthetics and ethics (and, equally, religion)’. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 7 vols, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, ed. Joseph Fessio and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982–89), vol. 1, 45; vol. 3, 401. Quoted by George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 209. JP 2:1445, p. 147 / SKS 26, NB33:24, p. 266, n.d. 1854. Encounters with Kierkegaard: A Life as Seen by His Contemporaries, coll., ed., and annot. Bruce H. Kirmmse, trans. Kirmmse and Virginia Laursen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 199. KJN 4, p. 41 / SKS 20, NB:39, p. 42, n.d. 1846. For discussion see Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 333–6.

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he may have known through its appropriation by Jean Paul,108 Kierkegaard recognized that ‘the first prize for an author is always for having his own style’, which ‘bears the mark of his own individuality’.109 He was offended that readers were ‘almost always surprised at [his] style’, because the enormousness of his books had led to the assumption that his work ‘must be hack writing’.110 The assessment of him as ‘a hack writer’ violated his self-understanding: I am completely convinced that there is no other Danish author who treats even the most insignificant word with the extraordinary care that I exhibit. I make 2 handwritten versions of everything I write, much of it in 3 or 4 versions, and then there is . . . the fact that I have said everything aloud to myself many times before I write it – look, that’s what they call hack writing!111 Most of what he wrote, he asserts, was written down only after having ‘been spoken aloud many, many times, perhaps scores of times’.112 Lamenting once to a friend that Danish literature ‘lacked a prose with the stamp of art’, Kierkegaard claimed to ‘have filled this gap’.113 To another friend, he reportedly announced, ‘Yes, you see. Well, Denmark has had its greatest sculptor in Thorvaldsen, its greatest poet in Oehlenschlæger, and its greatest prose stylist in me.’114 We cannot know whether Kierkegaard actually said this. Yet it parallels Kierkegaard’s suggestion in a journal entry of 1848 that ‘in a certain sense, Xnty [sic] is prose in comparison with poesy [Poesien] (which is wishful, enchanting, anesthetizing, and transforms the reality of life into an oriental dream …) – but [Christianity’s] prose [Prosa] is precisely eternity’s poesy [Evighedens Poesie]’.115 Kierkegaard would have been right to differentiate himself as a ‘prose stylist’ from the poet Oehlenschlæger, for, unlike him, Kierkegaard wrote only prose, and yet, as a definitively Christian prose artist, his commitment was to ‘eternity’s poesy’, Christianity. This last point is remarkably suggestive regarding the question of how literary form contributes to religious and Christian reflection.

CONCLUSION: KIERKEGAARD’S LITERATURE IN LITERATURE, AND FUTURE THEOLOGICAL TRAJECTORIES In 1855, shortly before his death amid his controversy with the Danish Church, Kierkegaard jotted in his journal, ‘I have managed to get my whole “prolix literature” situated in literature until its time comes.’116 This Janus-faced statement looks back to settle a past and ongoing literary score with his nemesis in the Kirkekampen (church

108

109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116

(Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de) Buffon, Discours sur le style: A Facsimile of the 1753 12mo edition, ed. Cedric E. Pickford (Hull, UK: Department of French, University of Hull, 1978), xvii. Cf. Jean Paul (pseud. for Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), Vorschule der Ästhetik [1804], 2nd edn, 3 vols (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1813), vol. 2, 601 [chapter 13, ‘Ueber den Stil oder die Darstellung’, §76]; ASKB 1381–3; KJN 1, p. 327. KJN 1, p. 23 / SKS 17, AA:12, p. 29, August 1, 1835. Cf. KJN 2, p. 24 / SKS 18, EE:69, p. 29, 15 May 1839: ‘For what is the manner of expression (the style) but the eternal birthmark [det evige Modermærke].’ KJN 4, p. 24 / SKS 20, NB:14, p. 26, n.d. 1846. KJN 4, p. 23 / SKS 20, NB:14, p. 25, n.d. 1846. KJN 9, p. 419 / SKS 25, NB30:41, p. 415, n.d. 1854. Encounters with Kierkegaard, 245. Encounters with Kierkegaard, 113. KJN 4, p. 358 / SKS 20, NB4:154, p. 358. TM, Suppl., 503 / SKP XI 3 B 89, p. 141.

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struggle), Martensen, while presciently anticipating the fate of his own posthumous reception as a thinker and writer. The expression ‘prolix literature’ (vidtløftige [literally, longwinded] Literatur), is heavily loaded. Martensen used the same phrase five years earlier to describe Kierkegaard’s authorship, which he claimed to have not read117 – something Kierkegaard never forgot or forgave.118 Four years later, Martensen echoed his own expression, dismissing ‘the whole prolix Kierkegaardian literature’,119 and submitting that Kierkegaard produced more books than God warranted. Kierkegaard’s claim now to have situated his ‘whole “prolix literature” . . . in literature’ is thus an assertion of vindication, and recalls the metaphor Victor Eremita used to describe the literary structure of Either/Or: just as Either/Or’s different ‘authors’ and constituent texts fit into one another like a Chinese box, so does Kierkegaard’s whole ‘literature’ now assume its place within literature as a whole. At the same time, the last clause of Kierkegaard’s 1855 statement proved prescient. Not only would Brandes adapt the same idea, approaching Kierkegaard’s writings as ‘a literature within literature’,120 but the future reception history of those writings would bear out Kierkegaard’s intimation, articulated in an almost Bible-like phrasing, that his literature in literature would need to wait, ‘until its time comes’ (compare e.g. Acts 3.21: ‘until the times of restitution of all things’). As fate had it, Kierkegaard was ‘misreceived’ from the time of his death to the end of the First World War; only then did the serious interpretation – and the many different theological and philosophical appropriations – of his works begin, no longer against the exclusive backdrop of the Kirkekampen.121 How might Kierkegaard’s literature ‘in literature’ enhance the task of contemporary theology, and how might it be employed to critique or reimagine the task and method of theology? As we saw earlier, for Kierkegaard, unlike Boccaccio, poetry and theology are not equatable, but the theological and philosophical dimensions of his thinking inhere within, and find expression through, the poetic, literary media that constitute his aesthetic authorship. Further, Kierkegaard’s authorship stands as a cautionary counterpoint to any theologians who, in assuming literary or poetic stances of their own, might be tempted to engage in a Romantic-like conflation of the poetic and prophetic functions. The antithesis of Muḥammad, Kierkegaard declined the prophet’s mantle while pronouncing himself a poet – albeit of an unusual kind. Considered as a kind of theological ‘literature’, Kierkegaard’s authorship not only satisfies but goes beyond Nathan Scott’s suggestion fifty years ago that theology cannot fulfill its calling in the modern world without taking complete account of contemporary arts; according to Scott, theology depends on modern literature and art ‘to venture into those chambers of imagery where the human spirit today, often unassisted by any of the supports of traditional faith, is radically probing anew into issues of ultimate import with which it is also perennially the office of religion to deal’.122 Whereas Scott

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Hans Lassen Martensen, Dogmatiske Oplysninger: Et Leilighedsskrift (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1850), 13; Eng.: TM, 624n20. See TM, 9n. / SKS 14, p. 129n.; and TM, Suppl., 491 / SKP XI 3 B 82, p. 125, n.d. 1854. TM, Suppl., 364 / SV1 14, 13. See further Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, ed. Ziolkowski, 31n12. Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard: En Kritisk Fremstilling i Grundrids (1877), in Samlede Skrifter, 18 vols (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1899–1910), vol. 2, 252; Ger. trans.: Sören Kierkegaard: Ein literarisches Charakterbild (Hildesheim: Georg Olm, 1975), 3. See Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, 78–135. Nathan A. Scott, Jr, ‘Introduction: Theology and the Literary Imagination’, in Adversity and Grace: Studies in Recent American Literature, ed. Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 1–25 [17]; quoted by Reklis, ‘Can Theology Be Postsecular?’, 387.

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thus urged theologians ‘to think about the fundamental issues of literary scholarship as a theologian’,123 Kierkegaard’s authorship transcends this directive inasmuch as it not only pays heed to literature and the arts but also becomes literary art. In so doing, the Kierkegaardian oeuvre – especially but not exclusively the pseudonymous, ‘aesthetic’ subcorpus – displays its author’s (and the pseudonyms’) deployment of a staggeringly broad range of constructive-imaginative devices that literary art makes available for sounding and probing the various stages and modalities of existence. On this point, to draw a quick contrast with Dante may prove instructive, only this time, appealing not to Boccaccio’s contemplation of his poetry, as at the start of this chapter, but rather to Hegel’s construal: whereas the Commedia, says Hegel, ‘bestrides the entire divine world’124 in the afterlife, the Kierkegaardian authorship bestrides the entirety of ‘life’s way’, whose coordinates and purview are all ensconced in the realm of immediate existence – and within, again, Taylor’s ‘frame’ of immanence. As Kierkegaard himself once boasted, ‘My service through literature is and will always be that I have set forth the decisive qualifications of the whole existential arena [hele det existentielle Omfangs] with a dialectical acuteness and a primitivity not to be found in any other literature.’125 As we have seen, Kierkegaard deemed himself a pre-eminent literary stylist and portrayed himself early on as a literary ‘weed’ likely to spread and, eventually, as the producer of a whole verbose literature that was now ‘situated’ in Western literature – an authorship whose time he knew was yet to come. Theologians today should of course be discouraged from trying to imitate Kierkegaard’s literary style by rote, for ‘the style is the man’, and few if any would deny Kierkegaard’s inimitability. Nonetheless, an undeniable allure of Kierkegaard’s style is his use of it on occasion to expose certain limitations of theology – for example, when he satirizes the ‘theological graduate’ as someone ‘personally living in essentially pagan categories’ with ‘no impression of Christianity’126; or notes that when Christ and ‘theological graduate Petersen’ both proclaim that ‘there is an eternal life’, aesthetically ‘both statements are equally good’, but there is ‘an eternal qualitative difference’ because Christ speaks with an ‘authority’ that the theologian lacks.127 The satiric tinges in such instances do not obscure lessons that ‘theological graduates’ today and tomorrow would still be remiss to ignore about theology. As it happens, Kathryn Reklis has recently revisited the well-known theological engagement with literature and the arts in the 1960s and 1970s by Scott, Amos Wilder and Stanley Romaine Hopper, and found in their enterprise – formalized in the Society for the Arts, Religion, and Contemporary Culture (ARC), of which they all were members – provocative anticipations of postmodern notions of ‘secular transcendence’.128 Graham Ward, as much as he may otherwise differ from them, argues in a kindred vein today that literature can never be completely secular; like religion and theology, literature is a cultural product and ‘is always and inevitably caught up with notions of thaumaturgy,

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Scott, ‘Introduction’, 17; his emphasis. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Werke, ‘Vollstandige Ausg.’, 18 vols, ed. P. Marheineke et al. (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1832–45), vol. 10, pt. 3, p. 247; ASKB 549–65; Eng.: Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), vol. 2, 979. JP 5:5914, p. 336 / SKS 20, NB:34.a, p. 37, n.d. 1846. For further comparison of Kierkegaard and Dante see Ziolkowski, The Literary Kierkegaard, 311–13. BA, 132 / SKP X 6 B 55, p. 58, n.d. 1849. WA, 101–2 / SKS 11, 105. Reklis, ‘Can Theology Be Postsecular?’, 392.

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revelatory disclosure, providence and eschatology’.129 As Reklis and others look towards ‘future work on the retrieval of aesthetics as a concept to orient postsecular epistemologies, in which theology plays a part’,130 Kierkegaard’s ‘literature in literature’, though unmentioned by her, presents itself as a most compelling prototype for such a project. Indeed, if aesthetics as a philosophical category, beginning with Baumgarten in the eighteenth century, was – in Terry Eagleton’s words – ‘born as a discourse of the body’ as a crucial chapter in its ‘long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical’,131 it was Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms who developed that category into a theologically pertinent stage of existence on life’s way.132 In this respect, it is hard to imagine how any theologian engaged in the aesthetic ‘turn’ any time soon might responsibly disregard, or fail to heed, the cartography already set forth by Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms of the ‘stages on life’s way’. Kierkegaard’s extraordinary influence on twentieth-century literature, from authors such as Unamuno and Kafka onwards, is well known. Jon Stewart has documented that impact in literature, criticism and art in Scandinavia, the Germanophone and Anglophone worlds, as well as the Romance languages and Eastern Europe.133 How, however, has Kierkegaard attracted theological reflection to seek and find literary expression? One obvious way has been through the rich afterlife Kierkegaard himself has enjoyed in fictional and dramatic literature. Here, I am not speaking, as I did above, of the general influence of his thinking and writings upon literature. Rather, I have in mind Kierkegaard’s tendency of being fictionalized into a literary ‘character’ in novels and stories. Constituting, in effect, imaginative constructions that draw upon Kierkegaard’s imaginative constructions, these fictional narratives by such writers as Henrik Stangerup, David Lodge and the much lesser-known Caroline Coleman O’Neill, among others,134 perpetuate in literary form his and his pseudonyms’ theological thinking with regard to any number of the themes for which he is famous – from love and seduction to faith, anxiety and despair. As much so as fiction, the theatre is the area in which the writings of Kierkegaard have fruitfully inspired adaptations that dramatize and animate different aspects of his and his pseudonyms’ theological reflection. Among contemporary theologians and other authors who have literally staged Kierkegaard, his characters and their ideas, George Pattison furnishes a prime example. Long convinced that the writings of Kierkegaard were significantly conditioned by his experience as a theatregoer, Pattison directed performances of an adaptation of Repetition at St John’s College, Oxford, in 2013, learning from this experience that ‘precisely as dramatis personae, figures such as Constantin Constantius

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Graham Ward, ‘Why Literature Can Never Be Entirely Secular ’, Religion & Literature 41, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 21–7 [23]; quoted by Reklis, ‘Can Theology Be Postsecular?’, 395. Reklis, ‘Can Theology Be Postsecular?’, 396. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 23, a portion of which is quoted by Reklis, ‘Can Theology Be Postsecular?’, 373. Cf. Eric Ziolkowski, ‘Kierkegaard’s Concept of the Aesthetic: A Semantic Leap from Baumgarten’, Literature and Theology 6, no. 1 (March 1992): 33–46. Kierkegaard’s Influence on Literature, Criticism, and Art, ed. Jon Stewart. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 12 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013–), Tome I: The Germanophone World (2013); Tome II: Denmark (2016); Tome III: Sweden and Norway (2016); Tome IV: The Anglophone World (2013); Tome V: The Romance Languages, Central and Eastern Europe (2013). See also, e.g., Leonardo Lisi, ‘Kierkegaard and Modern European Literature’, in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. George Pattison and John Lippitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 542–61. See my discussion of these and other examples in Ziolkowski, The Literary Kierkegaard, 262–93.

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and the Young Man of Repetition . . . have more breadth, depth, and credibility than the surface of the text at first seems to allow. They are less ciphers and more the germs of fully rounded existential characters’.135 In this respect, Pattison, as he himself acknowledges,136 was working in a tradition of theatrical adaptations of Kierkegaard’s life and works extending from Myfanwy Piper’s The Seducer (1958) to Wladimir Herman’s Kierkegaards Sidste Dage (‘Kierkegaard’s last days’) (1982), Roger Poole’s All Women and Quite a Few Men Are Right (performed in Edinburgh, 1986; unpublished) and András Nagy’s Kierkegaard Budapesten (‘Kierkegaard in Budapest’), which was first performed in Budapest in 1992, published there in 1994 and later translated under the title The Seducer’s Diary (1996).137 However, evidence of the considerable attractiveness today of Kierkegaard’s literary way of ‘doing theology’ is not limited to the fact that his life, authorship and theological thinking have manifestly encouraged such fictionalizations and dramatizations of themselves. In recent decades, international conferences and conference sessions involving theologians and literary scholars alike have been convened, both in and outside the West, to engage with Kierkegaard and his authorship from expressly literary and aesthetic perspectives.138 A paper by Christine H. Chou, a professor at Fu Jen Catholic University in New Taipei, seems especially revealing. In wrestling with Kierkegaard’s notion of himself as a ‘poet of the religious’ and the ‘religious aestheticism’ that distinguishes the authorship, Chou’s paper bears witness to the plausibility that the current globalization of Kierkegaard’s appeal – especially beyond the West – is facilitated by the authorship’s distinct blending of the theological and the aesthetic.139 To adapt Vidler’s observation from earlier, the disposition of so-called existentialists from Kierkegaard onward to express their contemplation of existence, whether theologically or not, through literary and dramatic media rather than abstract treatises holds an appeal that is genuinely universal – and also downright practical. This may explain why Gordon Marino’s How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age: The Existentialist’s Survival Guide (2018),140 a philosophical and theological self-help tour de force, stars Søren Kierkegaard with a supporting cast that includes numerous literary authors: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Sartre, Camus, Ralph Ellison and Don DeLillo, together with such poets as Matthew Arnold and W. H. Auden. So long as theologians, philosophers and other authors retain a concern with living ‘authentically’ in an age whose predominant 135

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George Pattison, ‘Play It Again: Kierkegaard’s Repetition as Philosophy and Drama’, in Theatrical Theology: Explorations in Performing the Faith, ed. Wesley Vander Lugt and Trevor A. Hart (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 113–25 [124]. Ibid., 124, n. 19. Myfanwy Piper, The Seducer: A Play in Two Acts (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1958); Wladimir Herman, Kierkegaards Sidste Dage: et skuespil (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1982); Roger Poole, All Women and Quite a Few Men Are Right (performed in Edinburgh, 1986; unpublished); András Nagy, Kierkegaard Budapesten: a Kierkegaard-hét elöadasai, 1992 December 1–4 (Budapest: Fekete Sas, 1994); Eng.: The Seducer’s Diary, in Hungarian Plays: New Drama from Hungary, ed. László Upor (London: Nick Hern, 1996). Consider, for example, ‘Kierkegaard: “The Christian in Love with Aesthetics” ’ (University of Durham, 1990); ‘Kierkegaard, the Religious Imagination, and Esthetics’ (American Academy of Religion, San Francisco, 2011); ‘Kierkegaard, Dante, Updike, Percy, and Others’ (American Academy of Religion, Chicago, 2012); the International Symposium on Søren Kierkegaard and Chinese Culture (Centre for Sino-Christian Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University, 2013). See Christine H. Chou, ‘The Problem of Interpreting Kierkegaard’s Aesthetic Writing, a Kind of “Writerly” Text’ (International Symposium on Søren Kierkegaard and Chinese Culture, Hong Kong Baptist University, unpublished conference proceedings, 21–23 May 2013), 53–63. New York: HarperCollins.

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mores threaten to quash that inclination, Kierkegaard’s literary mode of writing and existing will present itself as an enticingly antidotal way to follow.

FURTHER READING Pattison, George. Kierkegaard and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pattison, George. Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Walsh, Sylvia. Living Poetically: Kierkegaard’s Existential Aesthetics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Ziolkowski, Eric. The Literary Kierkegaard. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Ziolkowski, Eric, ed. Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Kierkegaard, Theology and Post-Christendom MEROLD WESTPHAL

INTRODUCTION What are the implications for Christian theology of living in a post-Christendom era? What is the relation of post-Christendom (or post-Christian) to postmodern? How might Kierkegaard help us in answering this question about the current context for theology in Europe and North America? The question arises quite naturally since Kierkegaard is famous for his ‘attack upon Christendom’. That is the title under which his last writings, an intense critique of the leadership of the state Lutheran Church, was originally published. But going back to the beginning of his authorship in 1843, texts like Either/Or and especially Fear and Trembling contain, in their portrayal of Judge William and the ethical stage, respectively, a critique of the complacent Christianity Kierkegaard would later call Christendom. Kierkegaard is famous for his quarrel with Hegel, but this is not a separate issue. He sees the System and the (state, Lutheran) Church as two sides of the same coin, one in a philosophical and the other in an ecclesial vocabulary.

I. DE JURE AND DE FACTO CHRISTENDOM To approach these questions, it will be useful to distinguish a weaker and a stronger sense of the term ‘Christendom’. In the weaker sense it designates the worldwide body of Christian believers at any given time. This meaning can be subdivided so as to distinguish (1.a) seriously practicing Christians, for whom their faith is a vital, everyday part of their identity, from (1.b) what can be called ‘census bureau Christians’, those who merely tick that box when asked for their religious identity. Perhaps these are ‘C & E Christians’, who attend church only at Christmas and Easter and who pray only in moments of personal or family crisis. Or perhaps they were baptized and confirmed but now only enter a church for weddings and funerals. I shall not try to define the minute differences since, in any case, we are talking about a spectrum rather than a dividing line. The stronger sense of ‘Christendom’ refers to contexts where some identifiable and observable form of Christianity is a major (geo)political, social and cultural power and authority in a given region. Here, too, we can make distinctions. We can have (2.a) a religiously defined state, including a state church and having at least some marks of a theocracy, or (2.b) a politically defined free church or congeries of churches. In the former case

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the power is de jure, established by the force of law, whereas in the latter case the power of the church(es) is de facto, supported by custom without legal enforcement. Of course, where this de facto power is sufficiently strong, it will make a difference in the legal landscape. It will generate laws that tend to reinforce it. In such a case it is not the law that creates Christendom but rather Christendom that makes (some of) the laws. Thus Jim Crow laws provided support for a white, Protestant, de facto Christendom in those parts of the United States sometimes called the ‘Bible Belt’ by giving legal status to various forms of racial segregation and discrimination, and current legislation shamelessly designed to suppress the vote of minority citizens continues that tradition. The dream of the Ku Klux Klan is alive and well, even where the burning crosses have disappeared. Sometimes the emphasis falls on keeping America white, sometimes on keeping American Christian. All too often the two are linked, even if this is not openly acknowledged. Such de facto cases are important and interesting. For example, the separation of church and state has been the law of the land in the United States since its inception.1 So there was no legal barrier in the United States to electing a Catholic, Jew or Muslim as president. But there was a very real cultural barrier that was not breached until 1960 with the election of Jack Kennedy. It is only more recently still that it has been possible to elect Muslims and atheists to the House of Representatives. Representative Barney Frank ‘outed’ himself as gay twenty-five years before acknowledging his atheism, and the latter only after he retired from elective office. In Massachusetts politics, at least, gay is OK but atheism is not. And Massachusetts is not even in the Bible Belt. This last case suggests that the situation is mixed. As I write during the 2016 US presidential election primary season, one of the two Democratic candidates is a Jew, and that has been a non-issue in the public debate. But on the Republican side there is widespread nostalgia for the days when the United States was a de facto, white, Protestant Christendom,2 and there has been no shortage of candidates who have appealed to this down-but-not-out sense that the United States is and ought to be a ‘Christian’ nation, however unchristian are the conclusions often drawn from this premise. The term ‘evangelical’ was originally a theological term signifying historic, Christian orthodoxy with an emphasis on personal conversion and biblical authority. It has morphed into something quite different, at least in the media, a socio-political term signifying this nostalgia. If any discussion of the ways in which the United States is or is not a form of Christendom must restrict itself to the de facto sense, the situation is not as different as it might seem across the pond. In European countries that still have a state church, the (declining) sense in which they are still in any meaningful sense Christian nations is as much or more due to cultural tradition than to the force of law.3 How a de facto Christendom works can be understood with the help of Jacques Ellul’s analysis of propaganda, though he is not particularly concerned with religion. Propaganda involves the manipulation of language and symbols in order to control people’s actions

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The First Amendment to the US Constitution reads, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ Under a doctrine called ‘incorporation’ and with the help of the Fourteenth Amendment, this double prohibition has been extended to state and local laws. For an analysis of the demographic changes that are the context for this nostalgia, see Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016). I write as an American with primary reference to the United States. I leave it to readers elsewhere to see how their situations are similar and different. Vladimir Putin has been developing his version of Russian nationalism by appealing to the Orthodox Church as part of the Russian tradition. Ironically, Russia may be more exemplary of what Kierkegaard understands by Christendom than Western Europe.

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and attitudes. To put the same thing a bit more harshly, propaganda is the art of manipulating people. But it is not necessary that there be a one-party dictatorship with a Joseph Goebbels as Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda or an Orwellian Ministry of Truth and Ministry of Love. As Ellul says, ‘Propaganda as a phenomenon is essentially the same in China or the Soviet Union or the United States or Algeria.’4 One way to see this, he notes, is to observe that ‘Public and human relations’ are as much forms of propaganda as ‘Re-education and brainwashing . . . these activities are propaganda because they seek to adapt the individual to a society, to a living standard, to an activity. They serve to make him conform, which is the aim of all propaganda’.5 In short, spin doctors use language and symbols to manipulate people. Ellul’s point is that the agent of propaganda need not be the state. A variation of the Pauline ‘you are slaves of the one whom you obey’ (Rom. 6.16) might be, ‘You are manipulated by those you allow to manipulate you’. Madison Avenue or political candidates or talk radio hosts can get the job done, especially since – in the absence of a totalitarian state – people are easily deluded into assuming that they are free from propaganda. The police are not necessary to enforce this conformity, but ‘the true exercise of democracy is almost impossible’.6 This is how multiparty ‘democracies’ can propagandize themselves. In my Introduction to Philosophy classes we always studied the conflict between Socrates and the sophists. I told students that the sophists had rhetorical skills so that they could persuade people to think and act in certain ways regardless of the facts of the matter. Then I asked them, ‘If you had such skills, where could you make a good living in our society?’ I always got the same three answers, immediately, but in no particular order: as advertisers,7 politicians and lawyers. Occasionally someone would add televangelists to the mix. Because they speak to larger audiences than lawyers, it is advertisers and political partisans who best illustrate Ellul’s analysis of the totalitarian character of propaganda in ‘democratic’ societies. Economic and political life becomes the competition of various factions for larger market shares of wealth and power, armed with the latest techniques for manipulating language and symbols to that end. That this is a cynical view does not mean that it is not disturbingly true. The government itself is not the agent of this propaganda. It is corporations, politicians and their talk show hosts, and other non-governmental organizations ranging from the National Rifle Association on the right to the grassroots environmental organization, the Sierra Club, on the left. Perhaps the aversion of the Founding Fathers to political parties as ‘factions’ was a sense that they would act too much like would-be dictators, more concerned with their own power and wealth than with the common good.8

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Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, trans. Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner, with introduction by Konrad Kellen (New York: Random House, 1965), xiv. Ibid., xiii. Ibid., xviii and xvi. I think it is clear that the public relations professionals to whom Ellul refers are a special subset of advertisers, seeking to ‘brand’ individuals and organizations favourably, and not just consumer products. See James Madison’s definition of a faction in ‘Federalist Number 10’: a faction is ‘a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community’. ‘Federalist Number 10’, in Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison, The Federalist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 53–62 [54].

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The reference to televangelists brings us back to religion. If a de jure Christendom is a bit like a one-party state, a de facto Christendom is a bit like a multiparty ‘democracy’ under the sway of the technologies of propaganda. Such a Christendom may be relatively monolithic or a somewhat pluralistic competition for market share. The political, social and cultural power and authority of Christian traditions is (1) real, (2) not dependent on the force of law for its creation and (3) productive of laws that mirror and sustain that hegemony. If some of this sounds somewhat dated, that is the point. Hence the reference to nostalgia. ‘Christendom’ is a less and less good description of the societies in which we live, in spite of persistent efforts to re-establish it. As our world becomes more secular and more religiously diverse it becomes more truly post-Christendom. We regularly hear about some new study confirming two ongoing trends: fewer and fewer people identify with any religion at all, while more and more identify themselves as atheists. But we do not need polls to tell us of such change. We experience it. For example, not so very long ago (though it seems like a very long time ago) children’s sports programmes did not schedule games or practices on Sunday mornings. It was assumed that too many families would want to be in church and Sunday school. Or again, we become accustomed to hearing people say, ‘I consider myself to be spiritual but not religious.’ Ecclesiastically, this presumably means that their lives are not shaped by participation in any community of faith. What it means theologically is perhaps less clear. But here are a couple of candidates. While campaigning for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders said in an interview, ‘I am not actively involved with organized religion . . . I think everyone believes in God in their own ways. To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.’9 Melissa Gilbert, best known to many as the young Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Little House on the Prairie TV series, was asked about her experience in recovery. ‘You’re in recovery – and in recovery, it’s highly recommended that you develop a spiritual practice. What does yours look like?’ She replied, ‘I have absolute belief in a higher power. I believe that I can do nothing without a community of people around me.’10 These are not the voices of Christendom, but they are surely part of the new normal. Perhaps the most distinctive mark of our post-Christendom situation is its pluralism. In varying ways and in varying degrees, Christianity has lost its monopoly privilege. It is no longer the default setting for modern life. Or should we say ‘postmodern’ life? For one of the best ways to distinguish the modern from the postmodern philosophy is in terms of the unity or diversity of reason itself. Modern philosophy (an ideal type) assumed that reason was universal, neutral, objective, presuppositionless. As the view from nowhere in particular, it was universal: the view from everywhere and for everyone. Thus, for example, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel offered us theologies or philosophies of religion that purported to be the expression of such a universal reason. But such a claim easily deconstructs itself, for it is easy to notice that each of these is mutually incompatible

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Frances Stead Sellers and John Wagner, ‘Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Participate in Organized Religion’, Washington Post, 27 January 2016. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/berniesanders-finally-answers-the-god-question/2016/01/26/83429390-bfb0-11e5-bcda-62a36b394160_story. html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0aba4c07c785(accessed 4 April 2019). Ana Marie Cox, ‘Melissa Gilbert Never Saw Congress in Her Future’, New York Times Magazine, 24 April 2016, 58.

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with both of the other two. None is the voice of Reason but rather the voice of reasons or reasonk or reasonh. Reason, and ‘religion within the bounds of reason alone’ (to use Kant’s title as the name of a general Enlightenment project), turns out to be as sectarian as religions that ground themselves in a special revelation, whether we think Judaism, Christianity and Islam, or Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant, or (with Will Herberg) Protestant, Catholic and Jew.11 Postmodern philosophy is the acknowledgment of reason’s inherent plurality. It has taken the hermeneutical turn and knows that thought always operates within some specific hermeneutical circle (or intersection of several) and has particular presuppositions which qualify and complicate any claim to be universal and unconditioned. It recognizes that thought is relative to the particular language games (Wittgenstein, Derrida), traditions (Gadamer) and social practices (Foucault) that are the a priori conditions of its possibility.12 So there is an inner kinship between the postmodern turn in philosophy and the postChristendom world of religious life. The hegemony of a single brand can no longer be taken for granted. It is not that under putative universality of modern philosophy and Christendom people were blind to a certain empirical pluralism: Hegel knew that he differed decisively from Spinoza and Kant, and Christians knew there were Jews and Muslims. It is rather that it was assumed (and continues to be in some places) that if these other voices did somehow manage to get heard, they could be decisively silenced and (what is crucial here) could be silenced from a standpoint that was not contaminated by contingent categories and particular principles that require justification themselves.

II. KIERKEGAARD ON CHRISTENDOM: FEAR AND TREMBLING Kierkegaard (along with Nietzsche) is often and rightly called the founder of existential philosophy. But it is equally true that (along with Nietzsche) he is a postmodern philosopher.13 He is especially important in the present context for two reasons. First, he sees Christianity in a postmodern context as one contestant among a plurality of alternatives that do not become self-evident by having a big fan base. Second, he is not a big fan of Christendom. He thinks that Constantinian Christianity, in which the Christian religion is the de jure and/or de facto official religion of a society is almost surely not authentic, biblical Christianity. It is rather, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, ‘wretched contentment’.14 Unlike Nietzsche, his critique is not intended to discredit Christianity but rather to purify it and protect it from its own complacency.

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Will Herberg, Protestant – Catholic – Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, with a new introduction by Martin E. Marty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955, 1983). For this analysis of postmodern philosophy and its implications for theology and philosophy of religion, see Merold Westphal, In Praise of Heteronomy: Making Room for Revelation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017). See Merold Westphal, ‘Kierkegaard’s Climacus – A Kind of Postmodernist’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997), 53–71; ‘Kierkegaard as Four-Dimensional Thinker’, in Kierkegaard and Christian Faith, ed. Paul Martens and C. Stephen Evans (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 13–23. The phrase is from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, ¶ 3; and part 4, section 13, ‘On the Higher Man’, ¶ 3, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), 124–6, 399–400.

498

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And from its idolatry. Paul Ricoeur describes the religion critiques of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud as the hermeneutics of suspicion, curiously failing to see that Kierkegaard is also a master of suspicion.15 Of the Freudian version he writes what could be said of Kierkegaard’s work as well: ‘My working hypothesis . . . is that psychoanalysis is necessarily iconoclastic, regardless of the faith or nonfaith of the psychoanalyst, and that this “destruction” of religion can be the counterpart of a faith purified of all idolatry.’16 It is well known that the last of Kierkegaard’s writings published during his lifetime were a shrill attack on the religious establishment of his day. Their first translation into English was appropriately given the title, Attack upon Christendom.17 But this attack begins at least as early as Fear and Trembling, though not by name. After several introductory gestures, Fear and Trembling revolves around three closely intertwined questions. The first, the most famous, and the most fully fraught is whether there can rightly be a teleological suspension of the ethical. Rather than purport to settle the question, the pseudonymous author, Johannes de Silentio, offers a double hypothetical.18 If there is no such legitimate suspension, then Hegel is right and the ethical is the highest norm for our beliefs and practices; but then Abraham is lost, for his action in being willing to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22) presupposes a religious norm that is higher than the ethical. In its absence he is a murderer. If, on the other hand, the ethical has only a relative, prima facie normativity that can be trumped by religious norms that are absolute and final, then Abraham can be the father of the faithful. But then Hegel is wrong. His philosophy of religion is not, as claimed, a higher and more fully rational form of Christianity. It is a different religion altogether, a social pantheism that is a rival to biblical faith, whose paradigm is Abraham, not only in Genesis, but also in Romans, Galatians, Hebrews and James.19 To understand this argument, we must be clear about the meaning of the key terms. First, a teleological suspension is what Hegel calls an Aufhebung. It occurs when something (say, an idea, or a social practice) that takes itself or is taken to be self-standing and self-sufficient is seen to be part of a larger whole of which it is not the organizing principle. What was seen as absolute is now seen as relative to something both greater and more fundamental than itself. Thus, ‘what is suspended is not relinquished but is preserved in the higher, which is its τέλος’.20 Hegel’s famous triads are a series of double Aufhebungen: Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Spirit; Being, Nothing, Becoming; Family, Civil Society, State; Art, Religion, Philosophy and so on. What we begin with needs to find its home in something other than itself.

15

16

17

18

19

20

I have defined the hermeneutics of suspicion as ‘the deliberate attempt to expose the self-deceptions involved in hiding our actual operative motives from ourselves, individually or collectively, in order not to notice how and how much our behavior and our beliefs are shaped by values we profess to disown’ (original italics). Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 13. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 270. Søren Kierkegaard, Attack upon Christendom, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944). See also TM. In the following I will speak of pseudonymous texts as Kierkegaard’s, not because I necessarily identify their content with his thought, but because he is the one who offers these ideas to us for our serious consideration. On Abraham as the paradigm of biblical faith, see not only Gen. 12–25.11 but also Rom. 4, Gal. 3.6-29, Heb. 6.13-20, and Jas 2.18-26. FT, 54.

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So the question is whether the religious signifies something higher than the ethical. That is why the second question is virtually identical with the first: ‘Is there an Absolute Duty to God?’21 If there is such a duty toward God, then ‘the ethical is reduced to the relative . . . This ethical relation is reduced to the relative in contradistinction to the absolute relation to God’.22 The normativity of the ethical is not abolished but demoted while being preserved in the religious, ‘which is its τέλος’. We are dealing here with two of Kierkegaard’s three stages (or spheres) of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. If we are not to misunderstand we must ask what Kierkegaard means, in the first place, by the ethical. We cannot simply plug in some meaning we happen to have on hand and assume we are listening to the text. The temptation to do this is enhanced by the fact that Kierkegaard, following Hegel, repeatedly tells us that the ethical is the universal. That makes it too easy to assume that he is talking about the moral law as the product of universal reason in some ahistorical, abstract form, uncontaminated by anything relative to a particular society or culture. Kant’s Categorical Imperative or Plato’s Forms, as understood by their authors, would be good candidates. But that is precisely not what either Hegel or Kierkegaard has in mind. The universal is what Hegel calls the concrete universal. It is not an eternal archetype of which there are empirical instances, but a worldly whole of which there are parts. Thus, for Hegel, ethical life (Sittlichkeit) consists of three moments: family, civil society, and the state. These are not unconditioned formal principles but historically conditioned material social practices or institutions in which individuals participate, defined and maintained in part by law and in part by custom. Thus, in its universality, ethical life is always particular. The whole in question is always this whole and not some other. Sittlichkeit signifies the laws and customs of one people (Volk) or one community (Gemeinschaft, Gemeinde) among many.23 Like the careful Hegelian he is (when discussing Hegel) Kierkegaard identifies the ethical as the universal, that is, as the ‘nation’, ‘state’, ‘society’, ‘church’ or ‘sect’.24 So the question of a teleological suspension or Aufhebung of the ethical is the question whether the laws and customs of my country, community or church are the highest norms for my life or whether they can be trumped by something higher called the religious. Here again we should look to Kierkegaard’s text and not some idea of religion we bring to it. Kierkegaard assumes that child sacrifice is forbidden by the society and culture in which Abraham lives.25 The (near) killing of Isaac can be considered a sacrifice rather than murder only if there is a higher law that in this case can trump the ethos of Abraham’s world. That higher law is not the natural law of Plato, the Stoics, Aquinas or Enlightenment rationalism. In the Genesis story, the only thing that could make it right for Abraham to conspire with Yahweh to offer Isaac is the fact that Yahweh told him to do so.26 The religious is defined here in terms of what theologians call special revelation. Yahweh is a personal God, capable of such speech acts as promises and commands. Such revelation need not be the only criterion for human belief and practice, but for Abraham and all his children in faith, it is the highest norm, trumping whatever fails to conform

21 22 23 24 25

26

FT, 68. FT, 70–1. As a matter of both law and custom, Sittlichkeit encompasses both de jure and de facto Christendoms. FT, 57–9, 62, 74, 79. Whether this is historically accurate is beside the point, so far as Kierkegaard’s argument is concerned. It is true that all the other references to child sacrifice in the Old Testament treat it as wicked, but these texts come from a later time in Israel’s history. I speak here of a conspiracy in the legal sense, a verbal agreement followed up with action toward its fulfilment.

500

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to it whether that be the abstract products of human reason or the concrete practices of human society. So we have an either/or. Either the laws and customs of one’s society and culture are absolute, the highest norm for one’s life, or they are only of relative authority, vulnerable to being overridden by divine revelation. The religious is inherently countercultural because it refuses to concede absolute authority to any human community and its conceptions of what is right and true. We should not think that the alternative to the religious is a secular society. Neither Hegel (the explicit representative of the primacy of the ethical in this text) nor Kierkegaard ever envisage such a possibility. Objective Spirit is always already aufgehoben in Absolute Spirit, which is to say that for Hegel every society has its own religion. Anticipating Feuerbach, Hegel says that ‘God’ is the self-consciousness of the religious community. So the modern state is not modern by being secular. As the highest embodiment of rational freedom it presupposes Christianity as the highest form of religion: it is a Christian state.27 In Either/Or, published earlier in the same year as Fear and Trembling (1843), Kierkegaard gives us a practical embodiment of the Hegelian ethical in the person of Judge William. In his long letters to the young aesthete he pleads with him to choose the ethical as the teleological suspension of the aesthetic.28 In good Hegelian fashion he understands the ethical not in terms of some abstract moral principle but in terms of the institution of marriage, as understood and practiced in his society. Nor is this a secular ethic, for he talks freely and often about God, whose importance he takes for granted.29 That Judge William embodies and expresses the ethical (in the Hegelian/Kierkegaardian sense) and not the religious (in the sense of Fear and Trembling) is hinted at in the sermon he sends to his young friend as a kind of afterthought to his own long letters. It was given to him by a pastor who was an old friend, not academically very brilliant and ‘stuck out in a little parish on the heath in Jylland’. It is entitled ‘The Upbuilding That Lies in the Thought That in Relation to God We Are Always in the Wrong’.30 Perhaps the judge thinks this applies only to his young friend; or perhaps he is having second thoughts about his own complacency. Either way, Kierkegaard leaves it to the reader to see the Hegelian self-confidence (‘wretched contentment’?) of the earlier letters deconstructing itself. For the sermon’s title contains a thought that did not occur to the good judge in them, for all their talk about God: that the bourgeois, ‘Christian’ ethos in terms of which he passes as a good and righteous man, is ‘human, all too human’.31 There may be some good in it, but it is not the Good, and there may be some truth in it, but

27

28

29

30 31

See, for example, the long Remark (Anmerkung, expansion in smaller type) to Paragraph 270 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 165–74. The idea, if not the language of Aufhebung, is there. Within the ethical there is a relative import of the aesthetic, which is ‘ennobled’ and ‘transfigured’ in the ethical. EO2, 21, 30–1, 47–8, 55–7, 61, 94, 142, 177, 226, 253. Perhaps Kierkegaard is remembering Judge William when he later writes that ‘in Christendom God’s name is the word that most frequently appears in daily speech and is clearly the word that is given the least thought and used most carelessly, because the poor, revealed God . . . has become a personage far too familiar to the whole population, a personage for whom they then do the exceedingly great service of going to church every once in a while’. SUD, 115–16. EO2, 337, 339. Nietzsche would publish Human, All Too Human in 1878.

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it is not the Truth. It should always be teleologically suspended, open to judgement and correction by God and the Word of God.32 Thus, to repeat, the either/or is not between the secular and the religious but between two ways of being religious. And one of these is idolatrous (though ‘Christian’ in name) – but not because it practices some ancient or tribal polytheism with graven images. The ethical is idolatrous when it is not teleologically suspended because it treats a human construction as if it were divine. ‘in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition. (Mk 7.7-8)33 They worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! (Rom. 1.25) In Barthian terms, the ethical of an all-too-Hegelian Christendom fails to distinguish revelation as divine speech addressed to human individuals and communities from religion as the ‘human, all too human’ interpretation and practice of that Word.34 Kierkegaard uses the term ‘Christendom’ only once in connection with Fear and Trembling, and that in a journal entry.35 But the continuity of this analysis of the Hegelian ethical, devoid of any Abrahamic faith, with his later critiques of Christendom makes it possible, even necessary, to see it as his opening shot across the bow of Danish Christendom.36 To say this is to use the term in its strong sense but raised to a new level of specificity. It is not just that the Christian religion plays an important role, partly de jure (law) and partly de facto (custom), in shaping the lifeworld of the Danish people. By treating the ethical as the highest they also treat themselves as God, or at least as God’s kingdom come in its fullness. Where it is not teleologically suspended, ‘the ethical is the divine’, ‘the ethical is of the same nature as a person’s eternal salvation’.37 In the churches the Bible is read; but the theoretical foundation of this society and culture is more accurately found in Hegelian philosophy as the teleological suspension of the Bible. That the Christianity of Christendom and Abraham’s faith are not variations on a single theme but deeply divergent directions for religious life is made clear by the repeated description in Fear and Trembling of the latter as ‘absurd’ or as ‘madness’. Here again we must avoid importing our meaning and attributing to the text the view that biblical faith is inherently absurd and a form of insanity by the criterion of universal, unconditioned Reason. Abrahamic faith is absurd, yes, but from the quite particular and contingent standpoint of a Hegelian philosophy and a Christendom that does not know ‘the

32

33 34

35 36 37

See also ‘The Joy of It That in Relation to God a Person Always Suffers as Guilty’, Section IV of ‘The Gospel of Sufferings’. There Kierkegaard writes, ‘Alas, in paganism the happiest of all thoughts was secured only by one’s being able to think that one was in the right in relation to God.’ UDVS, 274. Reading Either/Or in this light, one might suspect that Judge William is more pagan than Christian. The inner quotation is from Isa. 29.13 according to the Septuagint. Karl Barth, ‘The Revelation of God as the Abolition of Religion’, § 17 of Church Dogmatics, I, 2, The Doctrine of the Word of God, trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), 280–361. The second part of this section is entitled ‘Religion as Unbelief ’. Garrett Green points out that ‘abolition’ is a dreadful mistranslation of, you guessed it, Aufhebung, and he renders the term ‘sublimation’. This is too psychoanalytic in its overtones for me. I suggest ‘subordination’ or ‘relativizing’. See Garrett Green’s translation in On Religion (New York: T&T Clark, 2006). FT, 263, where he speaks of ‘the orthodox gangrenous issue in Christendom’. Taken together with the sermon at the end of EO2. FT, 60, 54.

502

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upbuilding that lies in the thought that against God we are always in the wrong’. It is madness, yes, but only in the eyes of the presumed sanity of the Established Order. It just might be like the insanity of those locked away in institutions by tyrannical governments for reasons of political dissent, a desperate attempt to immunize themselves from critique. This is why Kierkegaard alludes to ‘the divine madness that was admired by the pagans’.38 It was Socrates who spoke of ‘the superiority of the heaven-sent madness over man-made sanity’.39 Kierkegaard returns to the logic of this situation in Philosophical Fragments. In response to those who are offended by biblical faith as paradoxical, foolish, and absurd, the pseudonym Climacus replies, ‘It is just as you say, and the amazing thing is that you think that it is an objection.’40 There is an ‘acoustic illusion’ involved here. The Gospel had long since insisted that, as the wisdom of God it was foolishness to human understanding.41 Now the latter speaks as if it were the one to have discovered this opposition. In its original form it was an objection to the supposed ultimacy of any form of human wisdom, whether embodied in philosophical theory or political practice.42 One should be able to see this opposition from either side of the dividing line; but to decide which side is wisdom and which foolishness is an act of risky faith.

III. CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT Two moments from this massive text seem especially pertinent to the present discussion. The first occurs in the section entitled ‘The Speculative Point of View’, which means that as in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard sees the Hegelian philosophy as letting Christendom’s cat out of the bag, showing us its true nature. Speculative philosophy ‘has the good quality of having no presuppositions. It proceeds from nothing, assumes nothing as given . . . Yet one thing is assumed: Christianity as given. It is assumed that we are all Christians’.43 That is exactly what Christendom does. Kierkegaard uses a satirical vignette to illustrate this assumption. ‘At one time it was perilous to profess being a Christian;44 now it is precarious to doubt that one is.’ So, if someone were seriously to wonder whether ‘it was not quite right for him to call himself a Christian’, he would be found ‘boring’ or ‘eccentric’. If he were married, his wife would tell him, ‘Hubby, darling, where did you ever pick up such a notion? How can you not be a Christian? You are Danish, aren’t you? Doesn’t the geography book say that the predominant religion in Denmark is Lutheran-Christian? You aren’t a Jew, are you, or a Mohammedan? What else would you be, then? It is a thousand years since paganism was superseded; so I know you aren’t a pagan. Don’t you tend to your work in the office as a good civil servant; aren’t

38 39 40 41

42

43 44

FT, 23. Plato, Phaedrus 244d. PF, 52. See, for example, 1 Cor. 1.18–2.16 and Kierkegaard’s sermon, preached at Trinity Church, Copenhagen, 24 February 1844 on 1 Cor. 2.6-9, in Søren Kierkegaard, Johannes Climacus or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est and A Sermon, trans. T. H. Croxall (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 159–73. A repeated refrain in N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2013) is, ‘If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not.’ See pp. 1065, 1085 and 1302, along with the discussion of the imperial cult in pp. 321–43 and 1284–1319. CUP, 50. Emphasis added. For example, under a variety of Roman emperors prior to Constantine.

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you a good subject in a Christian nation, in a Lutheran-Christian state? So of course you are a Christian.’45 Here, being a Christian is a matter of location within what Hegel calls Objective Spirit. If, geopolitically speaking, you are the citizen of a certain state at a certain time in history and if, sociologically speaking, you are a respectable, productive member of civil society, then you are a Christian, automatically and without doubt. The second especially pertinent moment brings in the family, the third moment of ethical life. In Christendom it is your family that brings you to baptism as an infant and makes you a Christian ‘as a matter of course’.46 In a Kierkegaardian curriculum, baptism comes under the heading of ‘practical theology’ rather than ‘systematic theology’. At issue is not the metaphysics of the sacraments but their role in spiritual formation. From this angle infant baptism can be affirmed as an expression of concern by the congregation and the parents for the spiritual care of the child. But ‘the responsibility lies on the individual himself at a later stage’, and this is what gets lost in Christendom, when everyone is a Christian ‘as a matter of course’ or when people ‘are Christians simply and solely by virtue of a baptismal certificate, because the most ludicrous thing Christianity can ever become is to become what is called custom and habit in the banal sense’.47 Custom and habit are the foundations of Aristotelian virtue; one inherits the customs and forms the habits by one’s own actions. So perhaps the ‘banal sense’ signifies participation in the customs and habits of one’s people as if they deserved one’s highest efforts and unquestioned allegiance, immune from divine judgement. What gets lost here is ‘the responsibility [that] lies on the individual himself at a later stage’. Kierkegaard spells out this responsibility in terms of decision, appropriation and becoming. If faith is to be mine in any existentially significant sense, it cannot be something that just happens to me, like the colour of my hair. Infant baptism signifies a possibility that needs to be actualized in a process that begins with a decision to do so. As understood in Christendom, infant baptism presupposes that this decision has already been made at a time when the individual in question cannot make any decisions.48 Baptism signifies a gracious gift, to be sure. But ‘[w]hat is Baptism without appropriation?’ Appropriation cannot be reduced to an external ritual, for the appropriation of faith occurs in inwardness.49 It is a matter of the heart.50 Here Kierkegaard takes advantage of his earlier definition of truth in its subjective, existential sense, being in the truth or doing the truth: ‘An objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness.’51 While this appropriation is a matter of will and choice, it is not reducible to a momentary, one-off decision. Kierkegaard has nothing against conversion, but he sees conversion as a process, begun at baptism or perhaps at confirmation or at a conversion experience later in life, but requiring constant renewal. Perhaps an analogy can be 45 46 47 48 49 50

51

CUP, 50–1. Kierkegaard will return to this confidence that he is not a pagan. See below. CUP, 366–8, 373, 379, 418n. CUP, 363–4. CUP, 365–6, 372. CUP, 366. One of Kierkegaard’s profoundest analyses of the life of faith is An Occasional Discourse, better known by the subheading that states its theme, ‘Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing’. UDVS, 3–154. CUP, 203 (original italics). On the fourfold account of truth as subjectivity (in its how, not its what), see my analysis in Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript’ (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 114–33.

504

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found in the doctrine of creation. God created the world ‘in the beginning’, but it is only through sustaining acts (sometimes called ‘continuous creation’) that it has the power to continue to exist. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard expresses this by calling faith the ‘task of a lifetime’. In fact, the whole meditation on the faith of Abraham is framed between two statements of this claim.52 In Concluding Unscientific Postscript he puts it in terms of becoming.53 Rather than speak objectively about what Christianity is or ontologically about being a Christian, he insists on talking existentially about becoming a Christian. As a gift the grace of God is always already there; as a task my appropriation of the gift by living my life in the world it opens to me is never finished. Just as twelve-step programs teach us to say, not ‘I am a recovered alcoholic’, but ‘I am a recovering alcoholic’ (even if one has been sober for ten or twenty years), so Kierkegaard would teach us to say, not ‘I am a Christian’, but ‘I am becoming a Christian.’ These three themes of decision, appropriation and becoming can be seen as summed up in a fourth: the difficulty of becoming a Christian. Whereas Christendom (in its all-tooHegelian spirit) makes it too easy to be a Christian, Climacus tells us, ‘I comprehended that it was my task: to make difficulties everywhere . . . My intention is to make it difficult to become a Christian, yet not more difficult than it is, and not difficult for the obtuse and easy for the brainy.’54 Some of the difficulty is on the epistemic side. For, although biblical faith is not reducible to assenting to a doctrine, it does essentially involve certain beliefs. But these are at odds with merely human reason and as such are paradoxical, absurd and offensive. On the other hand, there are difficulties on the existential side, and the polemic against the soporific effects of the way infant baptism functions is an important part of that story. To live the life of faith is no easy task.

IV. CHRISTIAN DISCOURSES AND THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard states that for Abraham ‘the temptation is the ethical itself ’.55 That is to say, the temptation is to treat the laws and customs of one’s own society and culture as ‘the only infallible rule of faith and practice’,56 thereby excluding the possibility of an absolute God before whom every society and culture is only relative. Paganism signifies the hegemony of the ethical, so ‘Paganism does not know such a relationship to the divine’.57 The clear implication is that a Christendom that does not understand and teach the teleological suspension of the ethical is more nearly pagan than Christian.58 In Concluding Unscientific Postscript a different pseudonym has the very same concern. It is all too clear to him that the Christendom of the churches and the Hegelianism

52 53 54 55 56

57 58

FT, 7, 121–3. CUP, 365–6, 372. CUP, 187, 557. This is a recurring theme. See 130, 213, 241, 381–4, 428–31, 481–2, 587, 606–7, 619. FT, 60. This formula, derived from the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 1, has been used in some Presbyterian ordination rites, referring to Scripture. FT, 60. See notes 30 and 40 above.

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505

of the academy have confused Christianity with paganism: ‘In other words, speculative thought makes paganism the outcome of Christianity,59 and to be Christian as a matter of course by being baptized changes Christendom into a baptized paganism.’60 These passages anticipate the theme of ‘paganism in Christendom’ in Kierkegaard’s later writings. To note: the phrase is not ‘Christendom as paganism’, as if Christendom was entirely congruent with paganism, as if Christianity were just another pagan denomination along with Egyptian and Canaanite, Assyrian and Babylonian, Greek and Roman paganism. ‘Paganism in Christendom’ rather suggests that Christianity, which purports to be the healing of the sickness unto death, has become anything but healthy. It is infected by a virus that debilitates and distorts it to the point where it is hard to recognize. If we say that an ill person ‘looks like death warmed over’, we express the same paradox. The illness makes life look like death. When Christianity looks like paganism, whatever hope there may be lies in the fact that the victory of paganism is not yet final and complete. Sickness is sometimes followed up by healing and health. Throughout The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard (through Anti-Climacus, a third pseudonym) associates the pagan with the ‘natural man’. In both cases ‘he worships an idol as God’.61 In other words, to fallen humanity idolatry has become second nature.62 The ‘most dangerous’ and the ‘most common’ form of despair that Sickness seeks to diagnose is ‘The Despair That Is Ignorant of Being Despair, or the Despairing Ignorance of Having a Self and an Eternal Self’.63 This ignorance means not to know what it means to exist ‘before God’ (coram Deo), a crucial phrase in this text.64 It is unaware of the ‘infinite qualitative difference’65 between God and everything human and is, in the words of the apostle, ‘without God in the world’.66 Since the world of spirit abhors a vacuum as much as the world of nature, God’s place is taken by ‘some abstract universality (state, nation)’.67 This is the idolatry of the ‘natural man’, the pagan and the Christian who has been infected by the typical disease of Christendom. This Christian may have been regenerated or born again with new life from above, but that new life is suffering from a sickness unto death. Kierkegaard keeps up his polemic against Hegelian speculation in this regard. He satirizes the thinker who builds a massive System but ‘he himself does not personally live in this huge, domed palace but in a shed alongside it, or in a doghouse, or at best in a janitor’s quarters’.68 Academic interpretations of Christianity may be carriers of the virus. But Christendom is not a merely academic matter, and Kierkegaard offers three

59

60

61 62 63 64

65 66 67

68

By propagating an ethical life that is not teleologically suspended in a divine revelation in relation to which the former always stands under judgement. CUP, 368. Cf. 243–7, 361–2, 375 and 600. An analogy would be Martin Buber’s reference to ‘the baalization of YHVH Himself ’ in ancient Israel. The Prophetic Faith, trans. Carlyle Witton-Davies (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 118–20. SUD, 8. See the reference to Rom. 1.25 above. SUD, 42–7. See SUD, 46, 77–83, 101, 121, 159. For a splendid interpretation of Kierkegaard’s authorship with this theme at its centre, see Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). SUD, 99, 117, 121–2, 126–7, 129. Kierkegaard cites Eph. 2.12 in SUD, 81. SUD, 46. These are, as indicated above, concrete universalities. Here ‘abstract’ means they have been removed from the larger context to which they properly belong. The state and the nation also exist ‘before God’. SUD, 43–4.

506

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non-academic portraits of paganism in Christendom. Of his first exemplar he writes, ‘In Christendom he is also a Christian, goes to church every Sunday, listens to and understands the pastor, indeed, they have an understanding; he dies, the pastor ushers him into eternity for ten rix-dollars – but a self he was not and a self he did not become.’69 His pastor never taught him what it means to live ‘before God’. The second example is found among those competent and dynamic men who have a sense and aptitude for real life. Charming! He has been happily married now for several years . . . is a dynamic and enterprising man, a father and citizen, perhaps even an important man; at home in his own house the servants call him ‘He Himself ’; downtown he is among those addressed with ‘His Honor’; his conduct is based on respect of persons or on the way others regard one, and the others judge according to one’s social position. In Christendom he is a Christian (in the very same sense as in paganism he could be a pagan and in Holland a Hollander), one of the cultured Christians.70 Our third example rarely attends church, but he is ‘A real man.’ He is a university graduate, husband, father, even an exceptionally competent public office holder, a respectable father, pleasant company, very gentle to his wife, solicitude personified to his children. And Christian? – Well, yes, he is that, too, but prefers not to talk about it, although with a certain wistful joy he likes to see that his wife is occupied with religion to her upbuilding.71 A year before publishing The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard published a book entitled Christian Discourses. Part I is entitled ‘The Cares of the Pagans’. Its text is the Gospel lesson for the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity in the Danish lectionary, Mt. 6.24-34, and contains seven of his fourteen discourses he devoted to this text.72 It begins with the claim that ‘you cannot serve God and mammon’, goes on to reflect on the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and concludes with the admonition, ‘But seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness; then all these things will be added to you.’73 Seven cares (worries, anxieties) are mentioned in turn, and the format is the same in each case: the birds of the air do not have this care, the Christian does not have it either but the pagan does. With regard to the second and third claims, the appeal is not to sociopsychological research among different demographics. It is rather to an ideal type, the essence of what it is to be a Christian or a pagan. Thus the references are in the singular – the Christian or the pagan: we are living in the place, in a Christian country where there are only Christians. Therefore one must be able to draw the conclusion: the cares that are not found here with us . . . must be the cares of the pagans. One could draw this conclusion if, alas, another observation did not perhaps deprive us of the power to draw the conclusion by removing the presupposition [there are only Christians], and now one would draw

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SUD, 52. SUD, 56. SUD, 63–4. CD, 5–91. The other seven discourses are found in JFY, 145–215; UDVS, 155–212; and WA, 1–45. This is the English translation of the Danish text, CD, 7.

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another conclusion: these cares are found among people in this country; ergo, this Christian country is pagan.74 Since the pagan is described as ‘without God in the world’,75 the ironical implication is that the manner in which Christendom goes about being Christian involves smuggling God out of the country. The difference between believers and unbelievers is that the believers do not realize the extent to which they are unbelievers. As the pseudonymous author of Sickness puts it in another treatise, ‘Christendom has abolished Christianity without really knowing it itself. As a result, if something must be done, one must attempt again to introduce Christianity into Christendom.’76

V. THEOLOGY AFTER CHRISTENDOM Today’s task is different. But not entirely. For after Christendom is not the same as before Christendom. Remnants or traces of that Christendom still exist, and, as noted above, there is a strong nostalgia for a Christendom partly remembered and partly imagined. What Kierkegaard helps us see is that theology need not mourn the steady demise of Christendom. Whatever advantages it may have brought to the Christian churches came at a high price. Too high. Insofar as Christian theology today addresses an increasingly pagan world, its role is that of the missionary, proclaiming the Gospel to those who in a real sense have never really heard it before. The task is like that of pre-Constantinian Christianity. Then, Christianity was a peripheral sect, something like the Amish or the pacifist churches in an earlier white, Protestant American Christendom. But insofar as theology today addresses a residual and nostalgic Christendom, its role is that of the Hebrew prophet, protesting against the complacency and idolatry with which the Gospel has been infected by various human traditions. What might this double task look like? With an ear tuned to Kierkegaard and without any claim to being comprehensive, I offer the following suggestions. In a post-Christendom world . . . Christian theology (including preaching) will be postmodern. This is an epistemic point. Theology will acknowledge overtly that it is one voice among many voices competing for people’s attention and allegiance. It will recognize the ‘objective uncertainty’ of its message. While it will try to engage people where they are, it will not be a populist theology, appealing to what various audiences want to hear in order to be successful. Second, Christian theology will be countercultural. To guard against equating the ethical (in Kierkegaard’s Hegelian sense) with the divine, it will start with the assumption that the laws and customs of every people and community are ‘human, all too human’, and stand under the judgement of God (even, or especially when they present themselves as very religious). That’s the easy part. The hard part is applying this to the lifeworlds of those it most immediately addresses. There is a conservative lifeworld that equates being on the side of the angels with being against abortion and gay marriage. And there is a

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CD, 11. For a fuller account of these seven meditations, see Merold Westphal, ‘Paganism in Christendom’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007), 13–33. CD, 18, 19, 33. See note 66 above for a similar reference in SUD, 81. PC, 36.

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liberal lifeworld that equates being on the side of the angels with celebrating laws that permit both. There is enough complacency to go around. Because both sides are so sure God is on their side, neither is much afflicted with the thought that against God they are always in the wrong. Against those who are quite sure they know what Christianity is, this theology will seek to present ‘the strange new world within the Bible’.77 Theology needs to pose the question whether either side gets a passing grade by the standard of ‘liberty and justice for all’, to say nothing of loving our neighbour as we love ourselves, given the enormous disparity of wealth in this country, our idolatrous nationalism (that makes us God’s chosen people), and the endemic racism that we cannot seem to erase. Third, Christian theology will be wary of apologetics. This means that it will not try to be a public theology, if that means getting a good housekeeping seal of approval from the public or some sort of ‘public reason’. As postmodern, it will be suspicious of attempts to show Christianity to be ‘reasonable’ given the plurality of perspectives that present themselves as the voice of ‘Reason’. (This is a word of warning to the scholar.) As countercultural, it will know that showing Christianity to be ‘reasonable’ all too easily means showing it to conform to some ‘human, all too human’ sociocultural constellation. (This is a word of warning to the preacher.) Just as Abraham was unable to justify himself to his contemporaries by ‘the abstract products of human reason or the concrete practices of human society’,78 so this theology will be reluctant to appeal to either. It will be consistently kerygmatic. With Calvin it will trust the Holy Spirit to testify to the divine origin and authority of the biblical message, and with Luther it will trust the Holy Spirit to help the hearer understand what it means.79 Finally, this theology will be a biblical theology. There are two things I do not mean by this. First, I do not mean placing great emphasis on some theory of biblical inspiration and authority. Second, I am not referring to the now familiar distinction between ‘biblical’ and ‘systematic’ theology where the former seeks to take seriously the vast internal complexity of the Bible. There are genuine issues at stake where these matters are discussed. But what I mean by calling this theology ‘biblical’ is that it will have at its core a genuinely biblical conception of God as personal. From start to finish the Bible presents God in personal terms. A personal God is one, whatever impersonal metaphysical attributes may rightly be attached;80 is first and foremost an agent, not just a cause (even a First Cause); and a speaker, capable of such speech acts as promises and commands.81 The previous

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This is a chapter title in Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957), 20–50. This phrase appears above in the discussion of Fear and Trembling. Calvin writes, ‘Scripture Must Be Confirmed by the Witness of the Spirit. Thus May Its Authority Be Established as Certain; and It Is a Wicked Falsehood that Its Credibility Depends on the Judgment of the Church.’ John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), title to 1.7, p. 74. Luther writes, ‘No one can correctly understand God or His Word unless he has received such understanding immediately from the Holy Spirit . . . In such experience the Holy Spirit instructs us as in His own school, outside of which nothing is learned but empty words and prattle.’ Martin Luther, The Magnificat, trans. A. T. W. Steinhaeuser, in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 21: The Sermon on the Mount (Sermons) and The Magnificat, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St Louis, MO: Concordia, 1956), 299. An essential mark of ‘onto-theology’ as Heidegger defines the term is the attempt to define God in terms of abstract and impersonal metaphysical perfections. I have argued that Christian theology has as much reason to teleologically suspend onto-theology as does secular, postmodern theology. See Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). Promises and commands are the key elements in covenants, an utterly central biblical concept.

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three points, at least as I mean them, do not fully make sense in any other context. A truly personal God is too particular to be captured without remainder by any universal reason, especially when that reason turns out to be quite particular itself. And a truly personal God is too transcendent to fit without remainder into the theories and practices of any human established order. If Kierkegaard did not exist we might have to invent him on both of these points, particularity and transcendence. He is not intimidated by what theologians sometimes call ‘the scandal of particularity’. He recognizes that the biblical, personal God he always has in view is an agent and a speaker whose acts and utterances are unique. While this God may share some aspects of ‘the holy’ or ‘the sacred’ with other gods, the God of the Bible is not reducible to these. Nor, in terms of values, does this God fit without tension and conflict into the ethical life, the laws and customs of any human society. Not only in terms of what is real and what we can know, but especially in terms of how we should live our lives as individuals and communities, this God is transcendent. And Kierkegaard never lets us forget this. This involves a certain element of biblical literalism. It involves taking at face value the biblical language that presents God in personal terms as an agent and a speaker. So a brief clarification is in order. ‘Literalism’ often functions as an undefined term of abuse, in place of argument or analysis, to discredit some theology. But to serve clarity rather than obfuscation, the term needs to be defined with some precision. After all, it is hard (impossible?) to find anyone who is a literalist without qualification. When in the Old Testament God is often described as having brought victory with his powerful right arm, I’ve never heard or read anyone wondering whether God might have been a ‘southpaw’. Nor do Protestants, when they hear the words, ‘This is my body’, feel the need to take these words literally by developing a theory of transubstantiation. Strange as it may seem, my suggestion is that a postmodern, countercultural postChristendom Christian theology will be Thomist at this point. It will recognize that the distinction between literal and metaphorical speech needs refinement. Aquinas distinguishes analogical from metaphorical speech. If we call God a lion, this is a metaphor. The term primarily and properly applies to creatures and as such connotes one or more imperfections. If applied to God we have to filter out the imperfections and focus on the perfections, thought of as freed from those limitations. Though not an example that Aquinas uses, this is where the language about the strength of God’s right arm belongs. If, on the other hand, we say that God is love, matters are different. This term applies primarily and properly to God, for it implies no imperfections. Here Aquinas’s Platonism comes into view. Divine love is the ontological prototype and the semantic criterion. Strictly speaking, only God is love without qualification. Human love is a participation or imitation into which imperfection has crept. So this is a secondary and, strictly speaking, improper use of the term. There is a likeness between human and divine love, else the discourse would be simply untrue. But there is an unlikeness as well, else the difference between creator and creature would be compromised. Such discourse is not equivocal, confusing two entirely different meanings, as in ‘he is short’ (not tall) and ‘he is short’ (unable to pay his bill). But neither is it univocal, as if the two loves were not deeply different. Aquinas calls such discourse analogical and calls it the ‘proper’ use of the term. He distinguished this ‘proper’ use of ‘love’ as applied to God from ‘metaphorical’ descriptions such as ‘lion’. So, by contrast with metaphorical usage, we can call this ‘proper’ discourse literal while not forgetting that it is not univocal. Just as it can be appropriate but not ‘proper’ to speak of God as a lion, so it can be appropriate

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but not ‘proper’ to say that human spouses love each other and their children.82 Both cases are metaphorical. But ‘God so loved the world’ is literal discourse. Each of the four features of a possible post-Christendom Christian theology I have sketched open it to the ‘scandal of particularity’. But where Reason itself is sectarian and where it is clear that not everyone is a Christian ‘as a matter of course’, there is no reason why Christianity cannot be itself in all of its uniqueness. Like all of its theological and ideological competitors, it is a particular interpretation of reality that makes the bold claim of being good news for everyone.

FURTHER READING Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Random House, 1965. Jones, Robert P. The End of White Christian America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. Taylor, Charles. The Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Westphal, Merold. Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987. Westphal, Merold. ‘Paganism in Christendom’. In International Kierkegaard Commentary: Christian Discourses and The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 13–33. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2007.

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See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Qq. 12–13, and my discussion in Transcendence and SelfTranscendence: On God and the Soul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 133–41. In a different frame of reference, Paul Ricoeur ’s distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘second’ naivety may be helpful in understanding a discourse that is literal in the sense of being neither univocal nor metaphorical. See The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 347–57.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Epilogue: A Kind of Theologian DAVID J. GOUWENS

INTRODUCTION This volume on ‘the theology of Kierkegaard’ has sought to explore and indeed champion the importance of Søren Kierkegaard as a Christian theologian. In the prologue, Aaron P. Edwards articulates well why this is a controversial claim, for Kierkegaard’s theological ‘reputation’ has often been questioned for a host of reasons: his celebrated individualism, his anti-academic and anticlerical positions, and, most cuttingly perhaps, his suspicion of the entire enterprise of academic theology as it is conducted in the modern university and in the church. Indeed, as the reader of the chapters in this volume will have seen, the question of whether one can speak at all of ‘the theology of Kierkegaard’ is a recurrent concern of a number of our contributors, who give this question thoughtful consideration too. For example, Kierkegaard is often charged with irrationalism, fideism or volitionalism, opposed to common standards of rational theological discourse.1 Yet others question whether Kierkegaard’s literature has any religious or specifically Christian teleology at all.2 Even for those who might grant Kierkegaard’s theological influence, the common identification of him as an ‘existentialist’ theologian, seeing his influence primarily upon figures as diverse as Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, Friedrich Gogarten and even Emil Brunner and the Karl Barth of the Romans commentary, may be, for those who eschew that theological approach, an obstacle to taking him seriously.3 So, too, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the individual appears to many to be such an extreme form of individualism that Kierkegaard has no positive account to offer concerning central Christian theological interests in community or the church. Related to this, his final attack upon the established state church is sometimes viewed as an acosmic denial of the world.4

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While this volume on Kierkegaard’s theology does not treat these philosophical issues in detail, see Chapter 21 on faith by Matthew F. Wilson and C. Stephen Evans, which helpfully focuses on ‘Kierkegaard’s conception of how faith and reason interact’, and how Kierkegaard thinks of faith as ‘an ongoing activity, a never-completed task’ (371). For a carefully articulated response to these charges, see especially C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006). Kyle Roberts’s Chapter 2 on communication addresses this objection most directly. Lee C. Barrett’s Chapter 9 on Kierkegaard’s theological legacy rightly situates theological existentialism as one important but by no means the sole part of Kierkegaard’s later theological influence. Matthew D. Kirkpatrick’s Chapter 5 on Kierkegaard on the church deals with these concerns directly.

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Our contributors are aware of these challenges, but each in her or his own way wants to speak of ‘the theology of Kierkegaard’. Yet if Kierkegaard is a theologian, what kind of theologian is he? As Edwards also notes in his prologue, Kierkegaard defies easy categorization given the multifaceted and interdisciplinary quality of his thought in its many dimensions: philosophical, literary, religious and sociopolitical. I believe, however, that this protean character of Kierkegaard’s intellectual range as philosopher, poet, religious thinker and sociopolitical thinker is precisely the key for approaching him as a ‘kind of theologian’, a theme that I explored a number of years ago in Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker.5 Again, as Edwards notes, Kierkegaard certainly does not tailor his thought to the formal expectations of systematic theology, and, as our contributors frequently observe, neither is he, as Sylvia Walsh rightly says, ‘constructive, systematic, or speculative in the traditional theological manner’.6 This is not to say that Kierkegaard is opposed to doctrinal theology, for as our contributors show time and again he not only knows the history of doctrine in its classic and modern forms but also is deeply respectful, although certainly not uncritical, of the traditions of doctrinal theology. Nonetheless, he is not concerned with articulating or developing dogmatic theology. He was also highly critical of ‘apologetics’ at least in the sense that this suggests accommodating the stark challenge of the Christian message to cultural and intellectual norms, especially within a ‘speculative’ philosophical system. Rather, as philosopher and poet, Kierkegaard shaped a new ‘kind’ of theological inquiry. As I argue, without reducing theological beliefs or doctrines to expressions of affective states, and without losing a sense of the referential force of Christian doctrines, his primary interest is in locating Christian teachings within the matrix of Christian existence. This is why he insists, in the idiom of his pseudonym Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, that the ‘what’ of theology makes sense not by locating theological affirmations within a neutrally observed conceptual system, but only within the context of the ‘how’ of shaping the passions of Christian existence, which is why Climacus (and Kierkegaard himself) holds that Christianity is not a ‘doctrine’ but an ‘existence-communication’.7 When employed in the appropriate passional setting, particularly in the passions of faith, hope and love, Christian doctrinal language finds its home as persons ‘refer themselves’ into an entire ‘form of life’ in which the reality of God, revelation, Christ, sin, salvation and the entire range of Christian teachings define the world in which, through faith, they live and move.8 It is to enliven Christian faith as such a way of seeing oneself and one’s entire world in relation to God that Kierkegaard,

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David J. Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12. My approach to Kierkegaard is shaped especially by Paul L. Holmer. Sylvia Walsh, Living Christianly: Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Christian Existence (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 5, 5n9, 166. Walsh is a bit more hesitant about applying the term ‘theologian’ to Kierkegaard, ‘although this does not prevent others from applying his depictions and clarifications of Christian existence and its distinctive categories to the theological enterprise’. From the fact that Kierkegaard ‘did not consider himself to be a theologian’ and ‘regarded his task as descriptive rather than constructive, systematic, or speculative in the traditional theological manner’, Kierkegaard is in her judgement ‘more evangelical than theological’ (5). CUP, 587–616. For further discussion of this understanding of Christian doctrine, see especially Chapter 4 on doctrine by Lee C. Barrett.

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as a ‘kind of theologian’, employs all the rigour of his philosophical genius leavened with all the passion of the poet.9 It is within this mood, Kierkegaard thinks, that theological work has its home, and it is in this mood that Kierkegaard can stimulate theological reflection that is not merely the playing of an ‘academic game’, as Paul L. Holmer put it,10 but reflection aimed at getting clarity not only about one’s thoughts but in one’s life, clarity concerning what it is for a human being to stand, as so many of our contributors emphasize, coram Deo (before God).

I. RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT These reminders about how Kierkegaard may indeed be seen as a ‘kind of theologian’ who focuses upon the ‘how’ as well as the ‘what’ of Christian faith are helpful to keep in mind as we retrospectively see some of the issues that have emerged in this volume and conclude with a few comments on prospects for future reflection. Our contributors in Part One explored key factors in approaching Kierkegaard’s complex corpus, on his unique approach to communication, language, doctrine and the controversial question of his stance towards the church. All of these are important background issues for how theologians may approach Kierkegaard. As we have seen, Kyle Roberts in Chapter 2 on communication gives a spirited defence of seeing Kierkegaard as a religious and specifically Christian author concerned with ‘appropriation’, a defence sensitive to opposing viewpoints that see Kierkegaard rather as an imaginative ironist. Roberts does not at all deny Kierkegaard’s irony but sees that irony within a larger religious and Christian goal. Randall C. Zachman offers in Chapter 3 an impassioned account of Kierkegaard’s central awareness about the peril and promise of language, directed especially at the pastors and theologians. Zachman’s timely stress on the importance of ‘being alone’ with God’s Word in the practices of reading and praying in solitude, silence and suffering represents a long tradition of reading Kierkegaard that counsels above all the imperative addressed to the individual alone in her or his solitude, in essence, a return to the Luther of the cloister. The insistency of Kierkegaard’s imperative suggests furthermore that the only promise for the reform of church and theology lies within the individual’s self-examination leading to personal commitment and action.11 Lee C. Barrett (Chapter 4) and Matthew D. Kirkpatrick (Chapter 5) see Kierkegaard addressing the individual, to be sure, but also find Kierkegaard addressing ways to reform the social dimensions of both doctrine and the church. Barrett argues against

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Arnold B. Come perceptively observes ‘that Kierkegaard is primarily a theologian (of a very peculiar kind) who indeed is also a poet, but that his being a poet is precisely in the service of his being a theologian’. Arnold B. Come, Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 3. Eric Ziolkowski explores this theme in depth in Chapter 27 on Kierkegaard and literary media. Paul L. Holmer, ‘The Academic Game and Its Logic’, in Thinking the Faith with Passion: Selected Essays, ed. David J. Gouwens and Lee C. Barrett III (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2012), 123–39. See Aaron P. Edwards’ prologue to this volume. On ‘being alone’ with God’s Word, see FSE, 30. For a discussion of a similar point of view in the Scandinavian reception of Kierkegaard, see Per Lønning, ‘Kierkegaard: A Stumbling-Block to “Kierkegaardians”. What Theological Orientation Would He Favour Today?’, in Kierkegaard Revisited: Proceedings from the Conference ‘Kierkegaard and the Meaning of Meaning It’ Copenhagen, May 5–9, 1996, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Jon Stewart (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 94–106.

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seeing Kierkegaard as either an anti-doctrinal champion of subjectivity or a pro-doctrinal defender of orthodoxy; rather, Kierkegaard radically reimagines the rhetorical and passional dimensions of communication. That Kierkegaard can shed light on the social and ecclesial dimensions of theology emerges in appreciating how doctrines shape persons in communities in the passions appropriate to Christian existence. Kirkpatrick, like Zachman, takes Kierkegaard’s critique of the church seriously, but Kirkpatrick also sees that critique as a needed corrective within Kierkegaard’s robust understanding of community. These chapters provide therefore ample material for further consideration of the long-discussed issue of the relation of the ‘individual’ and the ‘ecclesial’ in Kierkegaard’s theology. In Part Two, our four contributors explore the historical and biographical context of Kierkegaard’s theological development. The portraits of Kierkegaard that emerge each contribute to a deeper appreciation of the depth of Kierkegaard’s training in theology and his appreciation of the importance of Scripture and preaching, all of which help explain the source of his continuing and very diverse theological legacy. Especially impressive is how Kierkegaard immersed himself as a theology student, both in the university and in the Pastoral Seminary, in Scripture, historical theology and his contemporaries’ own critical and constructive responses to the doctrinal tradition. George Pattison in Chapter 6 discusses his own translations of some of Kierkegaard’s student journals and notebooks and so is in a superb position to explore the depth of Kierkegaard’s knowledge both of the theological tradition and also its most recent interpreters. These notebooks are fascinating, too, in showing the genesis of some of Kierkegaard’s most distinctive points of view in theology. Joel D. S. Rasmussen in Chapter 7 gives a wide-ranging account of Kierkegaard as a profound reader of Scripture. Striking in this chapter is how Kierkegaard’s hermeneutics exhibits precisely that crossing of disciplinary boundaries that I have mentioned, for Rasmussen demonstrates how Kierkegaard employs his literary and aesthetic skills with amazing interpretive freedom in ‘reconfiguring’ biblical texts at the same time that he fixes his attention on the ‘absolute paradox’ of the God-man in the Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and then combines both hermeneutical strategies in articulating the hermeneutics of existential imitation of Christ. Rasmussen indirectly addresses too the dialectic between what Zachman identifies as the importance of solitary reading of the Bible with other more communal and ecclesial dimensions of Kierkegaard’s hermeneutics. Aaron P. Edwards in Chapter 8 brings to light a frequently ignored side of Kierkegaard’s theological biography: his continuing interest in, and his practice of, preaching, from his student sermons in the Pastoral Seminary to his written and delivered discourses, and his Citadelskirke sermon of 1851. This chapter provides an important corrective of the assumption that Kierkegaard’s theological interests were purely academic, for it shows how seriously Kierkegaard took the task of preaching. Finally, as already mentioned, Lee C. Barrett in Chapter 9 on Kierkegaard’s theological legacy explores his influence on so many different theologies after him. Barrett shows that Kierkegaard’s importance theologically resides in the extent to which he himself received many influences from his nineteenth-century context, provided his own critical responses to them and constructively developed his own strategy of encouraging the forms of pathos that constitute Christian convictions. Especially fascinating is how, given the nuanced nature of his appropriation of theological traditions, those following Kierkegaard are able to appropriate his work in many different ways, from neo-orthodoxy to postmodern

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religious thought, all of which can find plausible points of origin in Kierkegaard’s diverse authorship. The effect of this is to be cautious about seeing Kierkegaard as endorsing, as Johannes Climacus would have put it, any particular theological ‘party line’.12 Part Three focuses upon Kierkegaard’s reflections on particular doctrines, bringing to light how Kierkegaard both critically and creatively rethought central theological loci in ways that can contribute to constructive reflection on those doctrines in expected or unexpected ways. Striking is how Kierkegaard’s essential doctrinal orthodoxy coexists with remarkable doctrinal creativity. This calls to mind the young Kierkegaard’s comment in his journal, ‘The old Christian dogmatic terminology is like an enchanted castle where the loveliest princes and princesses rest in a deep sleep – it needs only to be awakened, to be brought to life, in order to stand in its full glory.’13 Space prohibits discussing each of the fifteen chapters in Part Three, so I will simply mention some striking features that emerge from looking at these chapters together. First, I want to offer a word of caution. As Edwards’s prologue first mentioned, and as I have already commented upon, Kierkegaard does not fit into the usual theological categories of systematics, dogmatics or apologetics. As editors, we have presented these chapters according to a traditional ordering of doctrines in a systematic theology, beginning with the doctrine of God and ending with eschatology, but these chapters on the various dogmatic loci are best read unsystematically. It would be a mistake, especially given Kierkegaard’s deep suspicions of dogmatics as practiced in his own day, to think that one may simply assemble the chapters in Part Three to improve upon him by constructing ‘Kierkegaard’s systematic theology’. Perhaps Kierkegaard’s doctrinal reflections resemble a loci approach to theology, as he takes on various theological themes in various writings.14 Yet even to describe his aims in terms of loci theology, with its instructional or catechetical implications, does not capture a central feature of Kierkegaard’s boundary-crossing stylistics that I discussed earlier: the way in which he freely combines philosophy, theology and poetry.15 Certainly that mix of disciplines and genres admirably serves his purposes of ‘upbuilding’. Here, too, it is important to keep in mind the various literary genres in which Kierkegaard works, for the literary forms that he employs are integral to the theological content. It is helpful always to ask of any one of Kierkegaard’s books, ‘Who is the author?’ and ‘Who is the implied audience?’ For example, Amy Laura Hall’s Chapter 23 on Kierkegaard on love shows particular interest in literary form as she investigates love in relation to the fictional depiction of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth. Taken together, these chapters reveal how, while not a dogmatician and indeed critical of ‘dogmatics’ as practiced in his own day by such figures as Hans Lassen Martensen, Kierkegaard engages in what David R. Law has recently called ‘existential dogmatics’, centred on ‘the articulation of an aspect of the paradox of the incarnation and the

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CUP, 619. KJN 1, p. 218 / SKS 17, DD:20, p. 226. On this journal entry see also Lee C. Barrett’s Chapter 4 on doctrine. This is not to suggest that Kierkegaard rejects systematic reflection, since he certainly engages in the task of relating doctrines to one another. He affirms rather than denies the coherence of Christian doctrinal teaching. What he rejects is a systematization that makes doctrines the object of an ‘understanding’ that loses sight of how doctrines shape Christian existence in relation to Jesus Christ. As in philosophy so in theology, Kierkegaard keeps his focus on ‘dialectic’ that describes movements of existence, not the arranging of abstract concepts. To take another example: Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety is a primary example of the ease with which Kierkegaard joins psychological analysis with doctrinal reflection yet without confusing them.

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obedience that it demands of human beings’.16 The predominance of Kierkegaard’s stress on the incarnation and related themes is evident especially in a number of our chapters, including theological anthropology (Podmore, Chapter 14), sin (Mahn, Chapter 15), revelation (Bokedal, Chapter 16), Christology (Walsh, Chapter 17), justification (Gouwens, Chapter 18), sanctification (Barnett, Chapter 19), faith (Wilson and Evans, Chapter 21), the Christian life as discipleship (Ziegler, Chapter 22) and love (Hall, Chapter 23). Yet Kierkegaard’s theology is not ‘Christomonistic’. Time and again in these chapters we see how Kierkegaard actually devotes remarkable attention to doctrinal loci outside the second article of the Apostles’ Creed, loci that are often assumed to be of little interest to him, or doctrines that may be, as one of our contributors puts it, ‘understated’ in his thought, such as Trinity (Martens, Chapter 10), the divine attributes (Rasmussen, Chapter 11), providence (Paylor, Chapter 12), creation (Torrance, Chapter 13), Holy Spirit (Rae, Chapter 20) and eschatology (Burgess, Chapter 24). Exploring these somewhat neglected themes in Kierkegaard’s theology, our contributors wonderfully expand our understanding of the breadth as well as the depth of his critical and constructive theological reflections, and the various ways that he relates each of these doctrines, often in quite unexpected ways, to Christian existence. To cite just one example of a relatively neglected doctrinal locus, as Joel D. S. Rasmussen argues in Chapter 11, Kierkegaard by no means dismisses language about the divine attributes (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence, etc.) as describing a speculative philosophical God but takes these concepts seriously as pertaining to the God of the Christian tradition. Similarly, Nathan Paylor in Chapter 12 demonstrates that while it may at first appear difficult to find any sustained discussion of providence in Kierkegaard’s writings, it does emerge powerfully as a doctrine that is ‘described incidentally’, ‘known experientially’ and ‘refracted Christologically’. I could continue with other examples; however, let me simply suggest that a number of our contributors employ a procedure of ‘developing’ Kierkegaard’s references and allusions to particular doctrines as they occur in different contexts in his writings. The legitimacy of this procedure of ‘developing’ lies in demonstrating that even though Kierkegaard often never articulates the details of a particular doctrinal statement, a close reading often reveals both a deep familiarity with the background of the doctrinal issue and also an essential coherence in Kierkegaard’s point of view. In ‘developing’ his point of view on a particular doctrine our contributors are well aware of the dangers of imposing a position that is foreign to Kierkegaard’s contextual uses of theological concepts. The depiction must be defensible based upon those uses. The warrant for this exercise in ‘developing’ Kierkegaard’s point of view is that he often assumes a familiarity with theological loci and sees no need to explicate the doctrine itself. In effect, then, many of our contributors are engaged in the task of highlighting for readers today what Kierkegaard assumed to be in place. A reader who wants to explore any one of these doctrines in Part Three would do well also to consult related doctrines, for there are interesting connections that emerge when the chapters are read together. Of many possible themes that arise when looking at these chapters in relation to each other, let me mention only two. The first theme is 16

David R. Law, ‘Kierkegaard as Existentialist Dogmatician: Kierkegaard on Systematic Theology, Doctrine, and Dogmatics’, in A Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Jon Stewart. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 253–68 [266]. Note that ‘existential dogmatics’ may, but need not, imply a commitment to ‘existentialism’.

517

EPILOGUE

517

Kierkegaard’s deep concern to reflect dialectically upon Christian faith as both gift and task, as evident in some of the chapter subtitles: ‘Spirit as the Self “Before” and “Resting in” God’, ‘Kierkegaard and the Journey Towards Rest’, ‘The Infinite Task of Passionate Belief ’ and ‘A Humble Striving Born of Gratitude’. These subtitles all touch upon the heart of Kierkegaard’s theological faith: existing before God in a Christian discipleship that is both gift and task, and the mystery of the relation of divine and human agency. One other theme that emerges from these chapters is the extent to which Kierkegaard can be seen in relation to a range of different Christian traditions, which truly is part of his appeal. Our chapter contributors come from a whole range of different church traditions: Anglican, Congregational, Episcopalian, Evangelical, Free Church, Lutheran, Methodist, Reformed and Roman Catholic. The influence of Luther and the Lutheran tradition, as well as Pietism, is of course evident in Kierkegaard’s treatment of justification (Gouwens, Chapter 18), yet it is remarkable the extent to which Kierkegaard has knowledge of, and draws upon, wider Christian traditions, including devotional and mystical writers, Pietism and the Roman Catholic tradition. For this reason, one avenue for further investigation is to explore Kierkegaard’s relevance to recent ecumenical theological concerns. This is perhaps most evident in the chapters on theological anthropology (Podmore, Chapter 14) and sanctification (Barnett, Chapter 19), where the concepts of the self coram Deo (before God) and the themes of journeying towards rest with God (Augustine) have rightly received renewed attention. Kierkegaard emerges then as anything but, as Climacus put it, a narrowly partisan ‘party-liner’, a proponent of any one Christian church or denomination or cause.17 On the contrary, he is a voice with much to contribute to a wide range of Christian communions, and to ecumenical theology. Finally, another way to reflect upon the chapters in Part Three is to notice how each contributor, not without criticism of Kierkegaard, also sees him making a constructive contribution to contemporary Christian theological witness. Each doctrine, our contributors suggest, provides a trajectory to how today we might ‘think with’ Kierkegaard on the doctrine at hand. To take only one example, it is striking how Philip G. Ziegler in Chapter 22 invites us to reflect upon Kierkegaard’s understanding of the Christian life in relation to recent consideration among New Testament scholars of the ‘apocalyptic’ Paul. What is exciting about all of the chapters in Part Three of the volume is how, taken together, they provide a perspective on Kierkegaard’s overall engagement with a full range of Christian doctrinal loci that will prove to be not merely of historical interest but also directly contribute to the ongoing constructive task of Christian theological reflection. In Part Four the task of constructively ‘thinking with’ Kierkegaard, already evident in the earlier chapters, comes into closer focus. Each of our contributors in Part Four proposes that ‘Kierkegaard’s theology’ is not a matter of historical interest alone but stimulates reflection upon our contemporary concerns. The ‘trajectories’ our contributors envision each illuminate Kierkegaard’s relevance to the aims and goals of theological study and theological confession to the world today. Stanley Hauerwas (Chapter 25) reports on one aspect of his long-standing engagement with Kierkegaard arising from his own interests in the social and cultural placement of theology in the academy, and he derives concrete insights for the Christian disciple’s duty to think theologically about the university in a way that challenges assumed modern values.

17

CUP, 619.

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Brian Brock (Chapter 26) brings Kierkegaardian insights to bear on problematic dimensions of life in the recent ‘information society’, including anonymity, the speed of communication, the role of the press in modern secular-democratic nation states and the effect that this speed of information media has on politics. Eric Ziolkowski (Chapter 27) offers important reflection on one of the central features of what I have called Kierkegaard’s ‘boundary-crossing’, Kierkegaard’s creative use of literary media for theological reflection (also discussed in Amy Laura Hall’s Chapter 23 on love). Ziolkowski suggests how Kierkegaard’s practice of ‘imaginary construction’ offers both a critique of traditional forms of theological expression and presents possibilities for reimagining theology as an activity infused by literary art. Finally, Merold Westphal (Chapter 28) thinks creatively about how Kierkegaard’s attack on ‘Christendom’ might be relevant to our own quite different ‘post-Christendom’ situation of increased religious pluralism and secularism. Kierkegaard can help us confront a complacent Christianity with a radical sense of the biblical God as personal, as agent and as speaker. Of course, this list of theological trajectories in Part Four is not intended to be exhaustive. Other trajectories worth exploring would include how Kierkegaard’s thought might stimulate closer attention not only to theology but also to specific practices in the church, including preaching, prayer, the reading of Scripture and a renewal of spiritual practices, both solitary and communal, that may shape individuals in Christian discipleship. Another important trajectory would be to explore how Kierkegaard’s specifically theological and doctrinal reflections address contemporary ethical concerns as well as issues in social and political theology, especially in our own ‘present age’ in all its turmoil. Finally, then, it is up to you, the reader, to identify your own trajectories: How might Kierkegaard serve as a resource for critical wisdom as we reflect upon theology’s task of witness in our own time? Our hope is to encourage such reflection on how Søren Kierkegaard’s theology might engage our own theological horizons in constructive and challenging ways.

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INDEX

abasement 97, 299, 305–6, 308, 311–13, 323, 341, 345–6, 399, 400 Abraham 80, 111, 121–2, 358–60, 363, 375, 378–9, 384–5, 498–9, 501, 504, 508 absolute paradox see paradox absurd 128, 269, 359, 374, 376, 378–9, 384, 387, 403, 501–2, 504 academy 4–8, 30–47, 52, 62, 68, 89–94, 112, 119, 121–5, 127–30, 133, 187, 190, 195, 203, 211, 237, 238, 239, 397, 443–5, 449–50, 453–5, 461, 463, 508, 511, 514, 517 Acts, Book of 91, 111, 116, 120, 168, 323 actuality 17, 23, 142, 144, 151, 182, 200, 242, 305, 312–14, 479, 482, 485–6 Adam 60–1, 106–7, 111, 168, 237, 264–70, 273–4 Adler, A. P. 53, 169, 279–80, 282–4, 290, 297, 364, 480 aesthetic 13–19, 24, 33, 38, 40, 107, 142–3, 150, 230–3, 235, 296, 404, 415, 481, 483–4, 486, 489–91, 499–500, 514 allegory 117, 137 Altizer, T. 162 Anabaptist 170 anonymity 253, 453, 455, 458–60, 464–5, 518 anthropology, theological 54, 58, 60, 97, 106, 168, 196, 205, 226, 229, 231, 234–6, 238–9, 242–4, 255–60, 263–5, 273, 292, 354, 356, 359–62, 366, 391, 401, 505, 516–17 Antinomianism 250 anxiety 60–1, 153, 195, 201, 209, 234, 253, 262–4, 268–71, 309, 429, 490, 506 apologetics 15, 162–3, 167, 424, 508, 512, 515 apophatic 51, 183, 251, 255 apostle 5, 30–1, 33–4, 46, 117, 130, 135, 137, 149, 168, 229, 273, 281, 283, 290, 296, 393, 428 appropriation 11–12, 18, 22–5, 27–8, 117, 122–4, 126, 128–35, 264–5, 282, 297, 372, 377, 386, 503–4, 513

Aquinas, T. 187, 191, 262, 338, 340, 373, 509 Aristotle 90, 225, 321, 474, 482 Arminianism 213–14, 222 Arndt, J. 319, 340, 344, 346 Athanasius 342, 355 atonement 16, 25–6, 52, 54, 98, 105, 108, 181–2, 272–4, 276, 285, 299, 306–7, 309–11, 320, 324–5, 327–8, 330–1 Augustine 59, 191, 208, 227, 245, 252, 260, 266–9, 273–4, 276, 293–5, 314, 316, 320, 331–2, 337–8, 340, 350, 462, 517 authority 15, 19, 25–6, 37–8, 43–4, 49–53, 55, 58, 97, 114, 118, 121, 147–52, 155, 168–9, 207, 246, 279–84, 286, 289–90, 292, 296–7, 302, 322, 328, 377, 382–3, 411, 443–4, 455, 465–8, 472, 479–80, 489, 493–4, 496, 500, 508 awakening 241, 249, 251, 256, 407, 515 Balle, N. 161, 187–91, 195–7, 200, 202–3, 205, 295 baptism 68, 80, 85, 238, 267, 269, 503–4 Barrett, L. C. 165, 214, 262, 268, 277, 292, 295, 307, 314, 331–2 Barth, K. 47, 103, 108, 113, 161, 169–70, 173, 262, 277, 367, 462, 501, 511 Bauckham, R. 112 Bauer, B. 99, 113, 119 Baur, F. C. 113 beauty 73, 197, 202, 224, 230–3, 235, 417–18 Bible see Scripture Boccaccio, G. 474, 486, 488–9 Boehme, J. 103 Boethius 212 Bonhoeffer, D. 266, 321, 363, 433 Brandes, G. 162, 169 Brorson, H. A. 344, 346 Brunner, E. 169–70 Buber, M. 169 Bultmann, R. 113, 163, 168, 511 Calvin, J. 326, 363–4, 396, 508 Calvinism 103, 214

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520

Caputo, J. 165 Christ, Jesus see Jesus Christ Christendom 12, 14–16, 23, 27, 31–3, 35–8, 43–6, 74–82, 84, 94, 132, 135–6, 139– 44, 157, 162, 169, 232, 244–5, 249, 254, 258, 272, 310, 313, 365, 397, 398, 444– 50, 456, 476, 499–507, 509–10, 518 Christian life see discipleship Christology 7, 21, 97, 105, 107, 116–17, 126, 135, 187, 200, 209, 214, 265, 273, 284–6, 289, 299–314, 320, 328, 357, 368, 386, 447–8, 516 Chrysostom, J. 143 church 7, 33–47, 53–5, 67–85, 91–4, 97–8, 105, 139–57, 161–2, 169–70, 187–8, 190, 204–5, 218, 231, 263, 269, 280, 290, 314–15, 322, 366–8, 397, 398, 418, 427, 443–4, 446–51, 456, 462, 469, 471, 476, 493–4, 496, 499, 501, 504, 506–7, 511, 513–14, 517–18 Clausen, H. N. 59, 61, 91, 93, 96–9, 119–20, 124, 161, 163, 166, 190–2, 195, 205, 208, 211, 319–20, 424 Cobb, J. 163 Come, A. 51, 172, 299, 354 communication 11–28, 401, 446, 454–5, 457–8, 460–4, 468–71, 512–14, 518 direct 12–13, 15–20, 24–6, 28, 220–1, 471 indirect 12–13, 15–17, 19–21, 24–5, 28, 50, 53, 61, 150–1, 157, 291, 299, 471 mass and social media 454–7, 460–4, 466–71, 518 speed of 455, 457, 460, 462–4, 469–70, 518 communion 53, 74–5, 80, 85, 120, 137, 149–52, 307–10, 328, 367–8, 406, 411, 420, 432, 435, 453, 462, 469, 471–2 community 74–5, 77, 81, 84–5, 113, 137, 182, 184, 258, 456, 471, 496, 499–500, 507, 511, 514, 517 confession 38–40, 70, 72–3, 80, 85, 190, 199, 211, 215, 268, 270, 288, 315, 322, 330, 468, 517 conscience 37–44, 47, 79, 198, 219, 310, 315, 317–18, 321, 329, 331, 414, 415, 436 Constantinianism 445, 450, 497, 507 Cox, H. 162 creation 7, 62–3, 65, 95, 98, 105–6, 164, 177, 210–11, 216, 217, 221, 223–39, 247, 251–2, 263–4, 266, 289, 291–2, 297, 311, 336, 338, 504, 516 cross 4, 52, 64–5, 217, 232, 305, 309, 311–12, 317–18, 322–4, 328–9, 331, 356–7,

INDEX

360, 362, 366, 391, 395–6, 398, 400–1, 420, 447, 450 crowd 1, 30, 253, 258–9, 294, 307, 367–8, 447–8, 456, 460, 465, 467–8, 470, 471–2 crucifixion see cross Cupitt, D. 162 De Lubac, H. 171 Derrida, J. 21, 165 despair 26, 64, 82, 195, 207, 215, 224–5, 228, 239, 241–3, 245–6, 248–53, 255–7, 259, 264, 274–6, 311, 324–6, 345, 350, 368–9, 391, 403, 409, 430, 436, 490, 505 dialectic 19, 71–2, 76, 78, 83, 85, 100, 106, 135–7, 168, 178–9, 190, 192, 197, 244, 248–50, 252, 259, 262, 275–6, 292, 302, 306–8, 311–12, 321, 323, 325, 331, 342–3, 348–9, 351, 374–7, 392–4, 395, 396, 397, 400, 402, 476, 485, 514, 517 difference, infinite qualitative 5, 169, 191, 224, 232, 235, 243–4, 250–3, 256–7, 262, 277, 297, 304, 332, 374, 393, 505 Dionysius 92, 191, 338, 349 direct communication see communication, direct discipleship 27, 95, 98, 112, 114–15, 136, 177, 179, 218, 231, 288, 311, 316, 318, 321–8, 350, 354, 356–69, 391, 392, 397–400, 433, 435, 447–8, 516–18 doctrine see theology doubt 118, 121, 147, 371, 381–3 Drachmann, A. B. 167 Ecclesiastes, Book of 137 ecclesiology 67, 70, 74, 81, 85–6, 91–8, 113, 190, 367, 469, 472, 493, 496, 514 Eckhart, M. 340 edification 15–16, 18, 20, 24–9, 40, 148, 154–5, 188, 196, 213, 222, 268, 403, 500, 502, 506, 515 education, Christian 17, 45–8, 179, 213, 220, 273, 281, 286–8, 295, 304, 444, 450 election see predestination Eller, V. 170 Elliott, C. 459 Emmanuel, S. 22, 172, 207, 222, 239–40, 281–2, 289, 297–8 Erasmus, D. 115–18 Erdmann, J. E. 92, 100–3

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INDEX

eschatology 7, 152, 380–1, 384, 391, 399, 423–40, 515–16 eternality 30, 32, 35, 37, 40, 43, 57, 62–3, 71, 78, 82–3, 97, 105, 187, 189, 191–3, 196–8, 204, 213, 216, 226–7, 235, 237, 274, 279–80, 282–4, 287–9, 296, 299, 301, 304–6, 374, 379, 384 ethics 11, 18, 23–8, 34, 94, 100, 121, 129, 182, 187, 235, 239, 268, 317, 397, 404, 410, 411–14, 416, 493, 498–501, 503–4, 509, 518 Evans, C. S. 17, 172, 177, 279, 282, 284–7, 291–2, 296, 298, 303, 359, 516 existentialism 23, 33, 36, 37–40, 43, 122, 168, 177, 185, 225, 227, 229, 238, 263, 276–7, 299–300, 336, 384, 386, 392, 396, 478, 497, 503–4, 511, 514–15 faith 7, 15, 27, 50–5, 64, 95, 97–8, 100–3, 163–73, 182–3, 190, 202, 204, 215, 218–21, 228–30, 233, 237–9, 243, 250, 252–5, 259, 261, 267, 274–7, 279, 282, 284, 286–91, 293, 295–7, 300–6, 315–32, 336, 344–9, 353, 358–60, 361–4, 367, 371–90, 391, 392, 395–6, 397–9, 402, 423, 427–8, 430, 431, 436, 445, 447–8, 453, 464, 468–9, 488, 493, 496, 498–9, 501–4, 512–13, 516–17 Fall, the 97, 99, 105–7, 224, 228, 263–6, 270–2, 274, 276–7, 287, 306, 312, 314, 505 Fenger, H. 18, 20, 481 Ferreira, M. J. 13, 172, 182 Fichte, J. G. 92 freedom 28, 95, 97–100, 105–7, 112, 115, 119, 121–2, 133–8, 189, 192–4, 199–202, 213, 224–7, 243, 246–9, 251–3, 255, 263, 267, 269, 271–3, 277, 288, 313, 327, 348, 396, 399, 402, 409, 412, 419, 458, 486, 500, 514 Frei, H. 112–13, 134 Gadamer, H.-G. 114 Garff, J. 18, 152, 155, 192, 268, 279–80, 293–5 Garrigou-Lagrange, R. 163 Geist (spirit) 30–2, 60, 124, 164, 187, 189, 196–7, 199, 204, 213, 215, 218, 225, 228–9, 234, 241–5, 248–9, 251, 254– 60, 261, 271, 274–5, 279, 290, 296, 306, 308–9, 356

521

Genesis, Book of 111, 121, 133, 265–7, 271, 498–9 gift 22, 25, 63, 65, 78, 138, 169–70, 180–1, 204, 210–11, 216, 244, 247–8, 250–1, 253, 259, 273, 293, 317, 373, 385–6, 388, 397, 400, 401, 403–4, 406, 407–9, 414, 418, 420, 423, 427–32, 435, 503–4, 517 God attributes of 95, 98, 177, 187–93, 195–6, 202–5, 211–12, 220, 516 changelessness of 151, 154, 157, 183, 187, 189, 191–2, 196–7, 204–5, 350 doctrine of 196, 205, 224, 226, 474, 483, 486, 515 as Father 97, 105–7, 180–2, 184, 204, 355, 362, 369 foreknowledge of 95, 98, 104, 108, 211, 307 love of 46–7, 65–6, 82, 180–1, 183–4, 188–9, 191, 195–8, 200, 203–5, 224, 227, 239, 248, 253, 255, 258, 262, 277, 289, 291–2, 293, 299, 304–7, 309–10, 314, 379–82, 404, 406, 408, 409, 509–10 omnipotence of 95, 187, 189, 191–4, 196–7, 199–202, 204, 212, 225, 226, 246–8, 254 omnipresence of 187, 189, 191–3, 196, 199, 204–5, 292, 369 omniscience of 95, 187, 189, 191–2, 196, 198, 205, 212 otherness of see difference, infinite qualitative personhood of see Trinity relationship with 177, 181–3, 198, 213, 215, 232, 235–6, 243, 247, 253, 255, 259, 423, 453, 469, 513, 517 sovereignty of 209, 211, 213, 215 Gospel 16, 25–6, 37–9, 43–7, 123, 129, 135–6, 140–5, 151, 157, 218, 261, 274, 277, 315–32, 354, 358, 364, 391, 394, 395, 396, 397, 401, 402, 423, 432–3, 435, 469–70, 502, 506–7 Gouwens, D. J. 51, 70, 165, 511 governance see providence grace 26, 76, 78, 128–9, 136, 160, 165, 169–73, 183, 190, 198–9, 211, 213, 226, 250, 252, 262, 265, 272–7, 292, 297, 310–11, 315, 318–32, 338–40, 349, 351, 365–9, 391–2, 393, 394–6, 398, 399, 400, 402, 403, 404, 407,

522

522

408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 419, 420, 429, 430, 432–3, 436, 504 Grundtvig, N. F. S. 55, 69, 91, 94, 97, 120, 124, 143–5, 168, 208, 482 Guardini, R. 171 Haecker, T. 163, 171 Hall, A. L. 170 Hamilton, A. 140–1, 144 Hampson, D. 51, 258, 366–7 Hartshorne, M. H. 17, 170 Hegel, G. W. F. 60, 62, 91–3, 100, 104, 113, 119, 159, 163–4, 178–9, 182–3, 245, 247, 260, 269–70, 284–5, 355, 375, 411, 424–5, 489, 493, 496–500, 503 Hegelianism 16, 53, 62, 68, 82, 91–3, 99, 105, 108, 119, 124, 164, 178, 182, 192, 224, 226, 231, 235, 238, 279–80, 283–6, 297, 302, 354, 405, 410–13, 415, 425, 499–502, 504–5, 507 Heiberg, J. L. 60, 62, 164, 283, 424–5 Heidegger, M. 508 hell 425, 437 hermeneutics 497–8, 514 Hilary of Poitiers 355, 369 Hirsch, E. 167 historical criticism 5, 112, 119, 121–5, 130, 136, 161, 163, 385, 514, 517 holiness 105, 170, 187, 189, 191, 196, 200–1, 315, 318, 335–51, 407, 420, 509 Holmer, P. L. 5, 165, 207, 320, 404–5, 407, 410, 412, 415, 418, 419, 449, 513 Holy Spirit 7, 30–2, 45, 62–5, 78, 82–3, 97, 105–6, 108, 163, 166, 179, 181–4, 188–9, 200–1, 217, 236, 320, 337, 340, 353–70, 420, 508–9, 516 hope 78, 83, 182, 224, 227, 317, 356, 358–9, 362, 369, 379, 387, 435, 512 Hugo St. Victor 356, 373 human agency 200, 211–14, 224–5, 234–5, 239, 265, 358, 517 humanity see anthropology, theological Hume, D. 197, 375, 381 hypostatic union see incarnation idolatry 221, 232, 468, 498, 501, 505, 507–8 imagination 33, 117, 121, 137, 226, 232–3, 282, 294, 300, 417–18, 449, 477, 481–2, 485 Imago Dei see anthropology, theological imitation 75–6, 78, 80–2, 113–15, 121, 126–7, 133–8, 179, 182–3, 204, 255, 310–14,

INDEX

319, 323–4, 327, 330–1, 337, 340–1, 346, 348–9, 366, 396, 399–400, 514 immanence 21, 58, 169, 191, 226, 235, 281, 285–6, 296, 465, 489 immortality 283, 381, 423–33, 438, 439 incarnation 16, 21, 53, 59, 63–4, 97, 101–2, 108, 111, 114, 118, 123, 125, 133, 161, 167, 169, 171, 179–80, 197, 230, 273, 276, 282, 285, 288–90, 294, 296–7, 299–302, 305, 311, 314, 342, 349, 374–8, 420, 431, 475, 514–16 indirect communication see communication, indirect individual 1, 30–1, 38–41, 45, 50–2, 54–6, 58–61, 64, 97, 102, 107–8, 113–18, 123–5, 131, 137, 141, 149, 162–8, 171–2, 177, 179, 182, 213–14, 216, 248, 250, 259–60, 263, 265, 267–8, 270–1, 275–6, 281–2, 287–8, 292–3, 295, 297, 301–3, 305, 307–8, 310, 314, 342–5, 364, 367–8, 400, 406, 407, 408, 411–13, 419–20, 423–4, 433, 446, 448, 456–9, 465, 468, 471, 476, 479, 495, 499, 501, 503, 509, 511, 513, 514, 518 infinite resignation 83, 127–8, 371, 380, 383, 384–5 information society 8, 453–7, 461, 468–70, 518 internet 453–64, 468, 470, 472 irony 11–12, 18–19, 29–30, 32, 50, 150, 155, 221, 247, 444, 446, 448–9, 456, 464–5, 471–2, 479, 507, 513 James, Epistle of 98, 128, 180, 197, 204, 210, 318–23, 331, 372, 498 Jespersen, K. 68 Jesus Christ contemporaneity with 235–6, 244, 288, 299, 305, 314, 344–5 as God-man see incarnation as prototype 26, 83, 180–2, 255, 299, 303, 310–14, 346 Job 111, 363 John, Gospel of 91, 116, 135, 181, 196, 428 Judaism 43, 95, 103–4, 137, 337, 431, 497 judgement 97, 104, 108, 217, 235, 273, 299, 330, 391, 392, 393, 394, 402, 423, 431, 433–6, 467, 501, 503, 507 justification 180, 182–3, 243, 253, 273, 315–32, 410, 497, 516 Justin Martyr 191

523

INDEX

Kant, I. 24, 60, 92, 96, 100–1, 107–8, 159, 161–3, 264, 284, 286, 319, 373, 375, 408, 497, 499 kenosis 64, 245, 254, 331, 457 Kierkegaard, S. as theologian 1–8, 49–66, 89–109, 177, 207, 223, 226, 230, 232, 355, 369, 398, 400, 444–6, 453, 455–7, 470, 491, 493, 511–14, 516–18 works of Book on Adler, The 232, 279, 280–4, 290, 296–7, 364, 377 Christian Discourses 197–200, 203, 210, 213–16, 218–19, 224, 237, 245, 248, 256, 262, 293, 306–10, 312 Concept of Anxiety, The 23, 53, 59, 90, 98–9, 106, 111, 248, 251, 268–71, 288–9, 397 Concept of Irony, The 3, 91, 93, 195, 245, 354, 423, 426 Concluding Unscientific Postscript 13, 16, 30, 94, 95, 99, 101, 111, 117, 120, 123, 196, 199, 203, 213, 216, 218, 221, 224–6, 234, 243, 245, 254–5, 258–9, 261–2, 277, 279, 284–5, 290, 292, 295–6, 313, 342, 347, 374, 376, 384–5, 403–5, 411, 424, 432, 437, 438, 483, 504, 514 Discourses for the Communion on Fridays 53, 57, 73–4, 307–10, 314, 327–30, 367 Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses 19, 180, 196–8, 200, 202–3, 210, 212, 216–18, 223, 238, 241–2, 257, 259–60, 349, 379, 385, 427 Either/Or 19, 30, 111, 117, 121–2, 134, 215–16, 256, 279, 392, 403, 414, 416, 428, 431, 475, 483, 485, 488, 500 Fear and Trembling 78, 83, 111, 121, 127, 178, 203, 213, 378–81, 383, 385–6, 403, 408, 420, 436, 497–8, 500–1, 504 For Self-Examination 57, 78–84, 111, 128–34, 180–4, 201, 209, 245–6, 254, 314, 321–7, 353–6, 358–9, 366 Judge For Yourself! 26, 78–84, 180, 211, 218, 261, 311–13, 315, 321–7 Moment, The 79–85, 183–4, 201–2, 204–5, 498 On My Work as an Author 13–14, 283, 295, 484 Philosophical Fragments 53, 101, 111, 123, 125, 180, 197, 212, 217, 225,

523

249–50, 274, 284, 286–9, 300–1, 320, 358, 363, 374, 376, 382, 385, 388, 394, 406, 410–11, 414, 419–20, 457, 502, 514 Point of View, The 12–13, 15, 17, 75, 219–20, 261, 293–5, 437, 446, 484 Practice in Christianity 26, 75–8, 111, 123, 126, 127, 134, 180, 200, 203, 212–13, 216, 218, 220–1, 251, 254, 259, 262, 277, 301–6, 312, 314, 323, 341, 345, 357, 376, 381, 483 Repetition 111, 209 Sickness Unto Death, The 75, 111, 123, 168, 180, 193, 195, 200, 227–8, 234, 241–4, 246, 248–53, 256, 258–9, 262, 264–5, 272–6, 345, 374, 434, 485, 505–6, 507 Stages on Life’s Way 111, 216, 277, 406 Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions 199–200, 212, 215 Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits 196, 197, 199, 203, 242, 256, 306, 311–12 Without Authority 233–4, 255, 257–8, 306, 309–10 Works of Love 65, 69–70, 78, 93, 134, 180–4, 198, 203, 229, 231, 237, 258, 292, 347, 359–60, 406–10, 411–15, 417, 419, 420 Kirkconnell, G. 170 Kirmmse, B. H. 85, 190, 268, 280 language 7, 15, 20, 23, 29–51, 54–9, 143, 150– 3, 163–6, 195–6, 203, 233, 263, 266, 267, 287–9, 306, 337, 343, 395, 475–6, 484, 494–5, 497, 509, 512–13, 516 Larsen, K. O. 169 law and gospel 184, 325–6, 354, 393, 407–9, 423, 432, 435 Law, D. R. 13, 51, 85, 170–1, 177, 183–4, 284–6, 289, 299–300, 307, 314, 515 Leibniz, G. W. 119, 227 Lessing, G. 113, 118–19, 287, 386 Lindström, V. 170 Lippitt, J. 121 literature 8, 244, 255, 292, 312, 473, 476, 481, 484, 487–90, 511 Locke, J. 373 Løgstrup, K. E. 169 love 6, 34, 44–7, 76, 78, 81–3, 93, 97–9, 105, 114, 125, 127, 130–4, 137, 172, 181–4, 191, 195–6, 203, 216, 218–19, 221,

524

524

229, 231–2, 258, 291–2, 294, 299–300, 309, 318–19, 327–32, 337–8, 345–9, 354, 358–60, 362, 369, 379–82, 387, 393, 398, 400, 402, 403, 425, 428–9, 430–1, 508–10, 512, 515–16, 518 Lowrie, W. 140, 150, 170, 444 Luther, M. 27, 41, 47, 68, 82, 92, 116–17, 128, 144, 179, 217–18, 245, 272, 294, 310, 315–32, 339–40, 364, 395, 397, 436, 513, 517 Lutheranism 2, 27, 51, 53, 55, 59, 64, 68, 120, 128, 132, 134, 166, 168–70, 182, 188, 190, 208, 211, 214, 217, 251, 253–4, 262, 272, 280, 289, 293, 295, 307–8, 311–12, 315–32, 339–40, 393, 407, 408, 424, 432, 493, 502–3, 508, 517 MacIntyre, A. 172 Mackey, L. 19, 50, 262, 478 maieutic see communication, indirect Malantschuk, G. 171, 382 Marheineke, P. 62, 91, 93, 97, 104–9, 164, 319–20 marriage 71, 125, 318, 338, 349, 410–11, 418, 477, 500 Martens, P. 353, 359, 362 Martensen, H. L. 58, 60–2, 68, 79, 91–2, 94–6, 99–102, 105, 119, 140–4, 164, 166, 169, 179, 192, 194, 204, 321–2, 325, 355, 367, 425, 486, 488, 515 martyrdom 76, 79, 82, 232, 311–12, 447–8 mediation 58, 71, 73–4, 269–70, 281, 297, 318, 477 Melanchthon, P. 318, 328, 339 Merton, T. 462 metaphysics 54, 58, 60–3, 161–5, 168, 187, 188, 191, 204, 217, 226, 235, 374, 503, 508 Miłosz, C. 474–6 Minear, P. 163 miracle 103, 118, 274, 290, 300, 303, 309, 405, 406, 419–20 mission 5, 141, 313, 469, 507 Mitchell, P. M. 2 moment 58, 60, 146, 151, 154, 197, 246, 271, 273, 286–91, 294, 296, 304, 308, 320, 343, 349, 362, 382, 394, 408, 418, 420 monergism 211, 214 morality 412, 417–18, 453, 457–62, 499–500 Mynster, J. P. 40, 69, 75–9, 140–7, 168, 219

INDEX

mystery 97, 99, 107–8, 199, 211, 260, 265, 272, 274, 279, 292–3, 296, 328, 382, 517 mysticism 170, 235, 244, 251, 254–5, 257, 260, 317, 337, 340, 344–5, 349, 350, 517 nature 168–73, 193, 210, 215, 226, 230–9, 292–3, 414, 498, 505 neo-orthodoxy 168, 262–4, 514 Niebuhr, R. 168, 262–5, 454 Noah 92 nouvelle théologie 171, 173 Nygren, A. 172 ontology 21, 28, 178, 182, 184, 204, 241, 251, 504, 509 Origen 104, 191 paganism 105, 227, 285, 466, 502, 504–6 pantheism 224, 237, 260, 498 paradox 21, 25, 33, 45, 47, 114–15, 123, 125–8, 134–7, 179–80, 196, 197, 204, 212, 220–1, 247, 255–7, 259, 265, 267, 269, 272–7, 281, 283, 289, 296–7, 299–304, 308, 342–5, 368, 374–9, 384–5, 387, 420, 457, 464, 468, 477, 502, 504–5, 514–15 passion 55–66, 218, 234, 257, 277, 291, 294, 299–301, 313, 371–90, 432, 437, 503, 512–14, 517 Pastoral Seminary 93, 145–9, 153, 256, 319, 514 Pattison, G. 145, 148–9, 151–2, 165, 193, 398, 483, 490–1 Paul, Apostle 91, 98, 103–4, 107, 198, 265, 272–3, 276, 316–17, 319–23, 331, 337, 357, 359, 396, 423, 430, 396, 420, 428, 495, 517 Paulli, J. H. 93, 143, 147 peace 73, 83, 142, 326, 337 Pelagianism 266–7, 272–3, 337–8 Pentecost 78, 360–2, 367 philosophy of religion 94, 96, 99, 179, 286, 380, 496–8, 500 Pietism 69–70, 166–70, 293–5, 315–16, 318–20, 323, 328, 331, 336, 340, 344, 346, 396, 423, 517 Platonic 60, 281, 284, 297, 299, 304, 427 Plekon, M. 70, 153, 177, 184 pneumatology see Holy Spirit

525

INDEX

poetics 17, 20, 29–30, 48, 315, 320, 331, 473–92 poetry 230–1, 299–300, 327, 420, 473–92, 512–13, 515 politics 68, 71, 74, 77, 167, 405, 444–5, 450, 453–6, 460, 464–8, 470, 493–6, 502–3, 512, 518 Polk, T. 112–13, 115, 121, 123, 126–7, 163 polyonymity 13, 28, 483 Pons, J. 114–15, 121 Poole, R. 50, 491 post-Christendom 8, 493, 496, 507, 510, 518 post-liberalism 112–13, 173 postmodernism 18, 21, 478, 489, 493, 496–7, 507, 508–9, 514 prayer 41–8, 95, 145–8, 150, 188, 203–4, 207, 215, 220–1, 254–7, 311, 361, 365–7, 404, 407, 414, 429, 438, 518 preaching 7, 15, 23, 31–9, 47, 52, 57, 69, 72, 75–7, 80, 84, 139–59, 212, 274–5, 305, 396, 431, 456, 507, 514, 518 predestination 91, 95, 98, 104, 108, 221, 266, 339 press, the 1, 30, 55, 453, 456–7, 460–1, 464– 7, 470, 518 presuppositional principles 58 proclamation see preaching professors 4–8, 16, 30, 33–8, 42, 44, 46–7, 52, 61–2, 120, 205, 444–6 providence 13–14, 83, 98, 107, 170, 198, 203, 207–20, 226, 228, 282, 293–5, 297, 414, 490, 516 Przywara, E. 171 pseudonymity 3, 12–28, 50, 52–3, 59, 111, 114, 121, 137, 189, 194, 199–200, 203, 209, 213–14, 216, 225, 227, 234, 299, 301–2, 306, 383, 392, 397, 410–11, 414, 419, 420, 424, 458, 483, 498, 502, 504, 505, 507, 512 purgatory 97 purpose 14, 122, 207, 211–12, 214–16, 224–5, 227–8, 233, 237, 239, 268, 384 Pyper, H. 120, 163 Pythagoras 42 Rae, M. 18, 51, 170, 177, 184–5, 205–6, 279, 288, 289, 293–4, 314, 325, 423, 516 Ramm, B. 168 reason 15, 19, 25, 96, 100–1, 105–7, 118–21, 160–3, 172, 191, 211, 220, 226, 283–7, 289, 290–1, 293, 296–7, 300, 302, 314,

525

358–9, 363, 371–83, 404, 405, 411, 420, 496–7, 499–501, 504, 508–10 redemption 62–4, 94–5, 164, 166, 169, 177, 272–6, 320, 323, 331, 339, 341, 395, 429 Reformation 68, 79–81, 91, 98–100, 103, 108, 116–17, 128, 134, 166, 315, 326, 339, 398, 401, 424, 436, 513, 517 Reimarus, H. S. 118 religious pluralism 496–7, 518 repentance 57, 64, 66, 98, 104, 202, 239, 262, 304, 320, 407 resurrection 97, 118, 326, 356–7, 386, 423, 427, 429, 431, 432–3 revelation 22–3, 26, 95–6, 105–9, 160, 167, 169–72, 180, 190, 199–200, 217, 227, 228, 237, 239, 252, 274, 279–97, 300, 307, 364, 372, 374, 376–7, 381–3, 388, 480, 497, 499–500, 512 Ricoeur, P. 114, 122, 265–7, 270, 277, 498 Roberts, K. 168, 478 Roberts, R. C. 320, 379, 382 Roman Catholicism 68, 70, 91, 95, 98, 100, 119–20, 124, 163, 171, 173, 263, 274, 332, 338–40, 476, 517 Romans, Book of 93–4, 103–4, 262, 316–17, 428, 498 Roos, H. 171 Rudelbach, A. 168 Rudin, W. 170 Sabellianism 355 sacred history 125–8, 210, 268, 276 salvation 47, 51, 54, 97, 166, 169–70, 177, 181, 212, 220, 222, 243, 251, 253, 263, 265, 272–3, 276–7, 293, 311, 314, 323–4, 326–8, 330, 343, 357, 391, 394, 395, 400, 402, 430, 431, 436–7, 501, 512 sanctification 98, 108, 170, 177, 180–3, 243, 251, 253, 259, 316, 318, 331–2, 335–51, 476, 516–17 Schaeffer, F. 163 Schaller, J. 102–3 Schelling, F. W. J. 62, 93, 107, 109, 477 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 61–2, 91, 93–6, 101, 104, 107, 113, 119, 159, 166–7, 173, 187–8, 190–6, 203, 205, 319 scholarship see academy Schrempf, C. 162 Schulz, H. 320

526

526

science 17, 224, 237–9, 271 Scripture authority of 25–6, 43–4, 105, 177, 188, 190, 239, 279–80, 282, 289, 290, 293, 297, 321, 364, 385, 470, 471–2, 501, 508–9, 514, 518 interpretation of 5, 7, 25–27, 43–4, 46–7, 69–70, 75, 96–8, 103, 111–38, 141, 144, 146, 150, 163, 190, 209, 239, 268, 323, 385, 470, 471–2, 501, 508–9, 514, 518 self 22, 26, 55, 64, 95, 97, 100–3, 105–7, 164–6, 172, 179–80, 182, 184, 192, 195, 197, 205, 207, 211, 218 227–8, 234–5, 238–9, 241–60, 262–5, 269–71, 274–5, 282, 284, 287–8, 290, 292–5, 299–300, 303–4, 316–17, 331–2, 362, 368–9, 375, 377, 382, 393–4, 395–6, 397, 401–2, 416, 419, 448, 458–9, 464, 471–2, 474, 505–6, 517 sermons 15, 139–59, 279, 280, 294, 328, 500, 514 Shakespeare, S. 20, 50, 165, 485 Shestov, L. 162 Sibbern, F. C. 62 silence 40–8, 72–3, 79–80, 221, 225, 256, 438, 463, 513 simplicity 181, 191–2 sin 16–17, 20, 25–8, 52–4, 57–61, 97, 102, 107, 111, 166–9, 202, 215–16, 225, 228, 232, 243, 246, 248, 250–3, 259, 261–77, 279, 285, 287, 289, 292–3, 296–7, 300, 304, 307–10, 316, 318–21, 328–32, 335–41, 344–6, 359, 361, 368–9, 373–6, 382–3, 388, 391, 393, 394, 401, 427, 447, 485, 512, 516 Socrates 14, 23, 25, 245, 273, 281, 284–7, 301, 304, 388, 424, 426–7, 432, 437, 438, 457, 495, 502 solitude 39–40, 43, 46–8, 73, 245, 258, 513 soteriology see salvation Spener, P. J. 340, 346 Spinoza, B. 105, 119, 284, 286, 373, 496–7 Sponheim, P. 51, 261, 264–5, 272, 277 Steiner, G. 137 Strauss, D. F. 92, 99, 102–3, 108, 113, 119, 161, 302 Strawser, M. 50, 183, 185 striving 24, 50, 57, 72, 97, 108, 166, 172, 182, 213, 311, 336, 342–51, 354, 358, 365–6, 391–2, 393, 397–400, 517

INDEX

subjectivity 1, 5–6, 22–3, 27, 36, 50, 53, 55, 58, 65, 67, 117, 124–33, 160–3, 167–72, 196, 243, 245–7, 276, 287, 321, 372, 391, 392–3, 396, 400–1, 503, 514 suffering 30–1, 34–6, 44–7, 183, 198, 200, 204, 207, 209, 215, 217–19, 228–9, 231–2, 234, 236, 254–6, 261, 266, 279, 293, 299–300, 303–11, 314–15, 323–4, 327, 344, 346–9, 358, 363–6, 369, 380, 391, 393, 397, 399, 400, 413, 505, 513 Swenson, D. 170 synergism 171, 211, 214 Tanakh 137 Tauler, J. 340 Taylor, B. B. 263 Taylor, C. 467, 474–6, 489 Taylor, M. C. 165 Tertullian 191, 267, 301–2 theological method 167, 261, 481, 488 theology academic 1–8, 2–6, 8, 30–47, 52, 62, 89– 125, 177, 184, 191–2, 203, 211, 214, 217, 220, 223, 226, 230–1, 243, 250–1, 261–3, 265, 274, 280, 292, 354, 361, 443–6, 481, 511, 513–14 speculative 89, 91–3, 99, 102, 105–9, 119– 20, 124, 159, 161, 163, 166, 182, 226, 232, 285, 319–20, 479 systematic 3, 50, 52, 54, 63, 66, 98–9, 104, 159, 165–6, 168, 177–8, 183, 187–8, 196, 207–8, 210–12, 214–15, 218, 221, 223, 226–7, 230, 237, 239, 242–3, 262, 265–6, 268, 276, 284, 290, 316–17, 319, 321, 355, 448–9, 476, 503, 508, 512, 515 Tietjen, M. 18 Tillich, P. 168, 263–4, 272 Torrance, A. 354 tragic 245, 258, 263–7, 269–70, 272 transcendence 21, 161–2, 168, 226–7, 232, 235, 238–9, 281, 285–6, 296, 474, 489, 509 Trinity 61–6, 97, 108, 163–4, 355, 359, 369, 471, 516 economic 62–3, 65, 178–80, 182–4, 359 immanent 62, 64–5, 97, 178, 182–4, 189 truth 1, 15, 22–3, 30, 32, 38–9, 43, 71–3, 79– 80, 117–19, 123, 125–6, 130, 133–4,

527

INDEX

140–1, 157, 189, 202, 217, 227, 229, 245–6, 260, 274–6, 279, 281–2, 284–9, 294, 296, 299, 301, 304, 306–7, 314, 347–8, 358, 363–4, 368, 372–3, 376–7, 382, 385–8, 392, 393, 394, 397–400, 401–2, 416, 418, 437, 444, 446–8, 464–6, 469, 483, 495, 500–1, 503 university see academy upbuilding see edification virtue 18, 159, 194, 235, 316–17, 325, 336, 338, 346, 503 Visby, C. H. 143, 147

527

Walsh, S. 51, 165, 177, 179, 185, 262, 299–313, 325, 328, 391, 392, 478, 486, 512, 516 Westphal, M. 344, 350, 359, 363 Wharton, E. 417–19, 515 Wissenschaft 95, 112, 115 Wittgenstein, L. 134, 165 Word of God see Scripture Yoder, J. H. 445 Young, A. 2 Zinzendorf, N. L. 69, 166, 346 Zwingli, U. 116

528