“Evasive
Maneuvers”: What Kierkegaard Can Still Teach the Church
By Paul Miller
“What must I do to be saved?”
The impassioned plea of the Philippian jailer to Paul and Silas (Acts
16:30) is the foundational question of Christian conversion; and Paul’s
reply, “Believe in the Lord Jesus” is its proper answer. But to utter
these words and leave it at that is insufficient; we must inquire
further what it means to believe. The long theological and spiritual
history of Christianity has established that to believe is much more
than merely to assent. Faith is not only an intellectual agreement but a
surrender of one’s entire being to the reality of Jesus Christ. It is a
deeply personal appropriation of the good news of salvation. The New
Testament describes the Christian way of faith as a complete
transformation, in which one is transferred from the realm of darkness
to the realm of light (Col 1: 12-13); dies and rises (Rom 6); is found
after being lost (Luke 15.) Unless one must be prepared to undergo this
transformation, implicit in the decision to believe, one cannot be
saved.
The early church labored hard
to explain a puzzling phenomenon: why, if Christ’s offer of salvation an
offer of life over death, far more people rejected it than accepted it.
The Gospel of John records that, immediately following the miraculous
division of the loaves and fishes (a messianic reenactment of the manna
in the wilderness), most of Jesus’ followers deserted him (John 6:66.)
If Jesus truly does have “the words of life,” why would so many refuse
the gift? The answer seems to be that, in order to receive the gift, one
must be prepared to undergo, a total life-change, complete metanoia ;
and that people naturally resist such disruptions to their routines.
So we find that Christians
have always been adept at avoiding the full implications of their faith.
Clever and inventive moral, theological and institutional strategies
have been devised that ensure the Gospel will not succeed in its
life-changing work. One writer who described this phenomenon with
brilliant perception was the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. In
this paper, I want to look at one aspect of Kierkegaard’s vision of
Christianity: his description of the evasive maneuvers Christians use to
keep Christ at a safe distance. Furthermore, I want to suggest that
Kierkegaard’s insights are still relevant to the church today.
Kierkegaard’s context was
European “Christendom” – the pervasive institutionalized,
publicly-regulated religious culture of nineteenth century Lutheran
Denmark, which, he argued, neutralized the radical message of Christ.
The emerging modern state had co-opted the church as a tool of social
control to safeguard the state’s interests.[i]
Kierkegaard saw the Christendom church as a tool of bourgeois culture, a
criticism shared by other nineteenth century critics like Marx and
Nietzsche. It achieved this end by defining a “Christian” as a
law-abiding, compliant and respectable citizen. Christians are those who
participate in accepted forms of public piety, such as baptism and
confirmation, without questioning whether these rites should lead to a
life change. Because Christendom valued conformity over conversion, it
served to dissipate the true passion of authentic faith. Christendom
actually undermined the biblically stated goal of God’s work in Jesus
Christ which is to transform the individual. Kierkegaard decried a
situation in which people claimed to be Christians “solely by virtue of
a baptismal certificate”[ii]
and noted that where everyone is a Christian, no one is really a
Christian.[iii]
“Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware
of it. The consequence is, that if anything is to be done, one must try
to introduce Christianity into Christendom.”[iv]
Even though Kierkegaard’s
Christendom has been replaced by a post-Christian amalgam of civil
religion, neo-pagan spirituality and an attitude of cynicism towards
religious institutions,[v]
the habits of heart and will that he described persist wherever people
come to church, not to be changed, but to remain as they are.[vi]
True, many congregations are communities of grace that lead their
members to deep and authentic faith; but every pastor is acquainted with
those who experience the disorientation of change in every other area of
their lives and take solace in knowing that, at least in church,
everything is as it should be.
The Concreteness of
Christianity
According to Kierkegaard,
Christianity announces to the world the ultimate and most baffling of
paradoxes: God has appeared in time.[vii]
The paradox of the incarnation cannot be argued speculatively, but only
appropriated personally. It cannot be analyzed but only obeyed. God’s
incursion into time affects human beings at the level of their concrete
existence, not in the abstract. For Kierkegaard, existence is the most
trustworthy category of being; but because of human limitation,
existence always seems to involve the collision of contradictory
realities. But human beings must have the courage to live amidst the
tensions of the world as it actually is, if they are going to live
authentically. This means they must face often tortuous choices between
opposing alternatives. There is no evading the travail of decision
because the true self is the ethical self who decides for what it is
true and good not theoretically, but in the concrete actuality of daily
existence.[viii]
In this sense, Kierkegaard rejected the side of the Enlightenment
tradition that tried to negotiate around the complex and the paradoxical
in a misguided search for a rationally transparent account of reality.
Such a quest is a false hope because only God is able to transcend the
tension and incompleteness of existence. We must face the anxiety of
paradox with courage and faith. Only by doing so, according to
Kierkegaard, can the individual move from inauthenticity to
authenticity. The person of faith must be involved passionately in the
business of existence and not try to take refuge in a realm of pure
thought which gives the illusion of being able to mediate easily between
contradictory alternatives. True faith always entails a “leap” from one
side to the other, not a smooth and painless transition. Not shying away
from paradox takes courage but infuses existence with passion, energy
and “spiritedness.”[ix]
Kierkegaard saw Christendom as
an organized drive to avoid this risk. It could not abide the
instabilities and uncertainties of existence and devised ways to resolve
and neutralize them. In the opening chapters of The Concluding
Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard identified two characteristic
tendencies that accounted for the evasive dimension of Christianity in
his time: “the historical point of view” and “the speculative point of
view.” By reviewing what Kierkegaard meant by these terms we can gain
insight into the evasive maneuvers of not only his time but our own.
The Historical Point of
View
History in the modern era is
not just a chronicle of the past but a comprehensive world view. The
Enlightenment rejected revelation as a source of truth in favor of the
methods of science which, during the nineteenth century, expanded
beyond the natural to the so-called human and social sciences, including
history. Kierkegaard saw great peril in the historical point of view,
however, which he regarded as a prime example of abstract thinking.
Abstraction results when the subject ceases to be personally related to
the object in question and takes up the position of a detached
spectator. “Abstract thought is disinterested,” Kiekegaard wrote, “but
for an existing individual, existence is the highest interest;”[x]
and historical method actually tries to circumvent existence by
“propos[ing] to make everyone an observer”[xi]
in the interests of “objectivity.” Indeed, one of the great spiritual
quests of the nineteenth century was to give an account of Christianity
in “objective” historical terms which were valid apart from personal
commitment or faith.
From a religious perspective,
this strategy is doomed to fail, according to Kierkegaard. The modern
study of history is based on an “approximation process” by which one
attempts to reconstruct the past on the basis of the best available
evidence.[xii]
But, when it comes to matters of truth, this is completely inadequate
precisely because any such claim to knowledge is only ever approximate
and provisional while Christian faith necessarily concerns matters of
“infinite personal interest.”[xiii]
When one tries to establish faith on things that can only ever be known
approximately, one ends up withholding genuine commitment pending more
complete knowledge. When this stance is adopted, constantly changing
historical judgments and hypotheses replace the appearance of eternity
into time and Jesus Christ is displaced as the ultimate criterion of
truth. Faith is then relativized and the believer is given license to
avoid the full crisis of decision by reserving judgment concerning the
historical truth of the Gospel. The historical point of view allows the
individual “to shirk something of the pain and crisis of decision,”
which, for Kierkegaard, is the essence of faith.[xiv]
The second problem with the
historical point of view hast to do with the meaning of the term
“history” in Kierkegaard’s time. Historical study was dominated by
speculative idealism which saw truth as embedded in the unfolding
development of human culture. History is the process by which Absolute
Spirit comes to realization and “God” is in no way separate from this
process but fully immanent.[xv]
One could go so far as to say that for Hegelians, history is the
divine, advancing towards full realization according to its own
inexorable dialectic. Like Kierkegaard, Hegel was concerned to
counteract the “spiritlessness” of the Enlightenment;[xvi]
but, Kierkegaard argued, what Hegelian idealism does is to render the
individual inconsequential. In the great world system, only grand
movements and big events are historically significant. What is a single
individual against the whole sweep of human history?[xvii]
And yet, in Kierkegaard’s view, the individual remains the irreducible
“center of value”[xviii]
and the “world historical” perspective “a demoralizing aesthetic
diversion” from the business of choosing the actual rather than
contemplating the general.
The historical point of view
also separates the believer from the source of faith by relegating the
events on which the Gospel is founded to a past supposedly remote from
the living concerns of the present. It encourages the view that
Christianity has progressed beyond its origins. Kierkegaard often
referred to the “the eighteen hundred years” that stood between the time
of Jesus and the present; and to the common belief that knowledge of God
had improved over this time. This is an illusion, Kierkegaard argued,
because faith does not advance cumulatively through research and
reflection, but appears whenever an individual responds to an encounter
with the paradox of Christ. Nineteenth century Christians were in no
better position to grasp the reality of Christ than the first believers.
The so-called “proof of the centuries,” essential to the doctrine of
progress, was of little value in evoking authentic faith.[xix]
“Eighteen centuries,” he wrote, “have no greater demonstrative force
than a single day, in relation to an eternal truth.”[xx]
“The fact that the eternal once came into existence in time is not a
something which has to be tested in time, not a something which men
are to test; but is a paradox by which men are to be tested.”[xxi]So,
the task is not to make Christ a starting point from which one can move
forward but to become “contemporaneous” with him as the first believers
were; to find ourselves in the same life-giving relation to the Savior
as those who walked and talked with him on earth.[xxii]
Neither historical proximity nor historical distance is of decisive
importance, only the individual’s confrontation with the living truth of
the Gospel. For these reasons, Kierkegaard was hostile to historicism
which, he believed, devalued the importance of the individual’s
transformation.
Historical Evasions Today.
None of this is to say that
history is not important. We are deeply indebted to the nineteenth
century’s development of historical consciousness and its methods. Our
faith has been aided by the rich understanding of Christian origins and
the context of Jesus that research has given us. Furthermore, we have
come a long way since the 1840s in our self-awareness and sensitivity to
presuppositions which can distort historical judgment. Good
historiographers are much better able today to take account of their own
perspective and prior assumptions and to minimize the effects they have
on their work.
And yet, Christians still use
the historical point of view to escape the claims of the Gospel. It is a
measure of historical criticism’s astonishing success that people
instinctively equate what is “true” with what can be established
factually about the past. Historians may have methodological doubts
about the great Ranke’s confident dictum that history describes the past
“as it really was” but it is a deeply entrenched popular view.
Historical critical judgments have become a trusted standard of truth.
Kierkegaard pointed out, though, how easily they can relativize and
ultimately neutralize the claim of the Christian message. The historical
point of view persuades the believer that the Gospel can truly be
understood apart from personal commitment. The two-hundred year quest
for the historical Jesus illustrates this. Although it is always risky
to generalize, it is safe to say that the historical-critical approach
tends to assume that the New Testament has concealed the “real” Jesus
behind the self-interest of the early church which must be stripped away
in order to get at the truth. Historical consciousness is a basic
component of the critical mindset and one of the chief characteristics
of the Enlightenment tradition.[xxiii]
Now, we are all products of the Enlightenment and we cannot escape its
influence, nor would we want to entirely. But we are most faithful to
our Enlightenment roots when we are self-critical and that means being
aware of the hidden presuppositions that affect our viewpoint. When
Christian believers think that the most important task is to achieve
historical “objectivity” and that this will lead to the “truth,” they
are actually alienating themselves from the truth which can never be
known disinterestedly but only passionately.
For several generations of
mainline Protestant clergy, historical criticism has been mother’s milk.
They have thoroughly imbibed this mindset which they have then taken
into their pastoral ministries. There is a view that research into
Christian origins and a demythologizing criticism of the New Testament
will lead modern church folks to authentic understanding and, therefore,
to faith which rests on rationalistic foundations. To believe with
integrity means to believe rationally. Van Harvey stated this position
in an extreme form some forty years ago, defining fearless commitment to
historical inquiry in terms of the “morality of knowledge.”
[xxiv] Harvey argued that
Christians who do not follow the historical-critical viewpoint suffer
from a failure of nerve and violate the integrity of thought. He
lamented, back in the 1960s, that so few Christians saw things this way.
I am amazed, though, at how deeply-rooted his basic presuppositions have
become in mainline Protestantism. Scholars, pastors and laity alike see
the main impediment to understanding as a lack of historical knowledge.
They assume that if the right tools could be put into the hands of the
people, and the “real” historical Jesus found behind the smoke and
mirrors of the Gospel accounts, they would be liberated from an
infantile view of Christianity.
To Kierkegaard, this quest for
“objectivity” only served to attenuate the vital claim of Jesus on the
life of the believer. Criticism, he argued, thinks it is dealing with
essentials but really its concerns are merely “parenthetical.”
“Exegesis,” the cornerstone of modern criticism, is “the first
parenthesis.”[xxv]
Exegesis, Kierkegaard mocked, is the business of “learned twaddlers” who
can only look backwards.[xxvi]
And so today, critical analysis, while an indispensable tool of modern
Christian knowledge, can quickly become master rather than servant. It
can degenerate into an escape into “the parenthetical,” the details
behind which the whole becomes lost. Ironically, when critical
objectivity becomes the overriding concern, the end result may be
radically and idiosyncratically subjective. Recent reconstructions of
the historical Jesus have bordered on the bizarre. Thomas Cahill,
summarizing on the fruits of contemporary Jesus research, remarks
somewhat cheekily, but not inaccurately:
Jesus
was a peasant revolutionary. No, he was an urbane wise man, something
like an Eastern sage – no, more like a Greek skeptic. It’s all in the
Dead Sea Scrolls and the Vatican is trying to keep it quiet; Jesus
didn’t actually die on the cross; he managed to escape, marry Mary
Magdelene, and move to southern France (as who would not if he could?)[xxvii]
Criticism has, at times,
veered so far into the tangential that Jesus is no longer a coherent
figure but is reduced to a fragmented and quirky anti-hero who may be an
object of some historical curiosity but scarcely one to whom one would
want to surrender one’s life. Not only that, surrender to Jesus is not
even a live option because his context is so remote from ours that he
has no truly credible claim on twenty-first century people, except as a
kind of general anti-establishment archetype. What ends up shaping our
lives is not a decisive and tension-filled encounter with Christ but the
prevailing prejudices of modernity. Kierkegaard sensed the spiritual
barrenness of modernity and his prophetic insights are descriptive of
our situation today. One is struck by how ethically, religiously and
existentially trivial so much of the study of Christian origins is,
despite a veneer of sophistication.
This is no mere academic
debate because so many pastors and church leaders have been enculturated
into it. The religious marketplace frequented by mainline clergy and
laity has been dominated recently by the Jesus Seminar, for example, or
more popular writers like John Shelby Spong. Many of my colleagues
without hesitation cite writers like Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan
and the aforementioned Spong as the formative influences on their
understanding of Christian faith, an understanding which, in turn,
shapes preaching, teaching and pastoral care. While no one, to my
knowledge, has studied the pastoral consequences of these developments,
I strongly suspect that the one main result is that they give further
permission to an educated laity to distance themselves morally and
spiritually from the demands of the Gospel.
The Speculative Point of
View
The second evasive strategy
that Kierkegaard describes in the Postscript is the tendency
towards abstract speculation. Kierkegaard saw speculation as the
substitution of thought for action which undermines true faith.
“Thought,” he wrote, “takes existence away from the real.”[xxviii]
Kierkegaard, of course, was not against thinking. But the nineteenth
century had become “the speculative century” which “made existence
tantamount to thinking about everything”[xxix]
in such a way that the real tension of ethical decision -- the essence
of faith -- is bypassed. Speculation is dangerous because presumes that
the individual can be a neutral observer, contemplating reality from a
safe distance. One is able, speculatively, to retreat into a world of
thought in which one can get “more and more away from [one]self.”[xxx]
Furthermore, speculation
dissolves the paradox that is at the very root of authentic existence.
In the end, speculation tries to deal with the “Absolute Paradox” of
Jesus, the God-man, by simply mediating it out of existence. “The
Absolute Paradox forces an ‘absolute decision’ – either believe
or be offended.”[xxxi]
The speculative frame of mind naturally seeks to avoid this “either-or”
and rebels against the seemingly contradictory elements of the
incarnation. Speculatively, the Christian Gospel seems like nonsense
because it puts together that which, rationally, is incommensurable. How
can God be confined to an individual human being bound by space and
time? In response, speculation tries to turn everything into a neatly
integrated and complete system.[xxxii]
Hegel did this by means of his dialectical method which embraced
contradictions as temporary stopping places on the road to a higher and
all-embracing unity. However, Kierkegaard argued, the paradox of the
Gospel cannot be speculated away because it is the very source of
passionate life and faith. Speculation may produce a beguiling aesthetic
harmony but it does so only by positing a false unity of thought and
being and by evading real existence.
The speculative point of view
turns the incarnation into a mythical expression of the convergence of
the human and the divine. Hegel himself viewed every particular as a
manifestation of Geist, the world spirit, and he argued that
universal concepts are what give particular embodiments their reality.
This was an exact inversion of the truth, according to Kierkegaard, and
an avoidance mechanism designed to sidestep the full force of Christian
revelation. The incarnation is not just “the clothing in human form of
religious ideas”[xxxiii]
but God’s shattering of the boundaries between time and eternity, body
and spirit, heaven and earth in Jesus of Nazareth. This event cannot be
explained in terms other than itself but only appropriated in faith. It
inspires not thought but wonder.
The speculative mindset tries
to assert control over a reality that is simply too unruly and
perplexing to be accepted without cost. “The philosopher contemplates
Christianity,” he wrote, “for the sake of interpenetrating it with his
speculative thought.”[xxxiv]
A heavy price is paid for the spurious satisfaction of reining in
reality, however; that price is nothing less than the loss of true
inwardness. “While the speculative and worshipful Herr Professor is
engaged in explaining the whole of existence, he has forgotten his own
name; namely, that he is a human being, not a fantastic three-eighths of
a paragraph.”[xxxv]
The speculative frame of mind leads to an aesthetically pleasing but
ethically and spiritually dissipated form of existence which is
ultimately impoverished.
This same drive towards
control can be observed today whenever Christianity is regarded merely
as a theoretical religious perspective in a universe of religious
perspectives. When it is so regarded, the Gospel message is reduced to a
topic of interest, a subject of curiosity which one may inquire into or
know “about” but not submit one’s life to.[xxxvi]
As a consequence, its hazardous existential claims are rendered docile
and harmless. One area that is especially vulnerable to these tendencies
is so-called interfaith dialogue. In a sense, our awareness of other
religious worldviews is a rejection of Hegelian universalism because it
demands that we take other traditions seriously in their own terms and
not force them into mould. And it is a good thing that Christians are
hungry to learn about other religious traditions and to overcome
Christian triumphalism. The Kierkegaardian issue, though, is not what
is pursued but the way in which it is pursued. The besetting
speculative temptation today is to subordinate all religious
claims to a supposedly higher general theory of religion as a cultural
construct. When Christians engage in conversation about “other faiths”
they need to beware lest, under the guise of sympathy, they do not end
up bracketing the question of ultimate truth which is at the root of all
religions and thereby dissipate their power of transcendence. Many
mainline Christians are deeply troubled by Jesus’ statement in the
Gospel of John, “I am the Way and the Truth and the Life. No one comes
to the Father but by me” because it seems to claim that Christianity is
the only path to God. Such a response expresses concern for people of
“other faiths.” But often this text is dealt with in such a way that all
religious truth claims are relativized. “How many have not asked ‘What
is truth?’ and at bottom hoped that vast spaces would intervene before
truth comes close to him?” Kierkegaard asked.[xxxvii]
We need Kierkegaardian discernment so that we do not give the appearance
of fostering tolerance when we are in fact sheltering ourselves from the
uncomfortable demands of our own faith.
Bogus Subjectivity
Subjectivity is the proper
orientation of the authentic self, according to Kierkegaard.[xxxviii]
However, subjectivity itself can become an evasive maneuver if the
“infinite qualitative difference” between God and the self is collapsed.
On the one hand, Kierkegaard attacked the objectivity that “seeks to
shirk something of the pain and crisis of the decision;”[xxxix]
but on the other he rejected the subjectivity that claims an easy and
painless unity with the divine.
This phenomenon takes various
forms, for example, the tendency to view the truth as something one
possesses naturally. In the opening chapters of Philosophical
Fragments, Kierkegaard discusses two ways of learning the truth. One
is the Socratic way in which “all learning and inquiry is interpreted as
a kind of remembering.”[xl]
Socrates argued that “one cannot seek for what he knows” because it is
already known and does not need to be sought; but “it seems equally
impossible for him to seek for what he does not know” because one would
not even know what to look for except on the basis of some antecedent
knowledge.[xli]
Therefore, Socrates argued that we must already be in possession of the
truth and need only to awakened to what is already there. A teacher,
then, is really a midwife who does not so much impart knowledge but
bring it to birth; and moments in time are inconsequential because if
enlightenment does not come today it may come tomorrow. “From the
standpoint of Socratic thought every point of departure in time is eo
ipso accidental, an occasion, a vanishing moment.”[xlii]
The Christian perspective is
profoundly different, according to Kierkegaard. Truth is not a
possession of the subject but a revelation from beyond. Consequently,
“the moment must have decisive significance … because the Eternal, which
hitherto did not exist, came into existence at this moment.”[xliii]
The only way one can come to know this truth is through an incursion of
the divine, not through intuition. Furthermore, a teacher is absolutely
necessary, and apart from a personal and life-changing encounter with
such a teacher, we remain lost in a state of error. This state of error
is known by the name “sin”[xliv];
and, “let us call [the Teacher] Saviour, for he saves the learner
from bondage and from himself; let us call him Redeemer, for he
redeems the learner from the captivity into which he has plunged
himself.”[xlv]
The moment when we encounter the Teacher is “the Fullness of Time” and
the result is a conversion from an old way of life to a new, a “change
from non-being to being,” nothing less than a “New Birth.”[xlvi]
Under the pseudonym of
Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard articulated in philosophical language the
Christian account of prevenient grace, conviction of sin, repentance,
conversion and salvation. The choice is between Socratic recollection in
which one assumes to possess the truth already, and Christian revelation
according to which truth is a gracious and saving gift. Despite his
great reverence for Socrates, Kierkegaard viewed his doctrine of
recollection as a persistent form of paganism:
All
paganism consists in this, that God is related to man directly, as the
obviously extraordinary to the astonished observer. But the spiritual
relationship to God in the truth, i.e., in inwardness, is conditioned by
a prior irruption of inwardness, which corresponds to the divine
elusiveness that God has absolutely nothing obvious about Him, that God
is so far from being obvious that He is invisible.[xlvii]
There is nothing about human
existence that leads naturally and immediately to a knowledge of God. If
God did not seek us, God would remain unknown.
This discussion has sharp
relevance to our own time. It describes what is probably the primary
evasive strategy of contemporary spiritualities that define themselves
in terms of a quest for “the God within.” Certain forms of feminist
spirituality, for example, do this by equating women’s experience with
the divine. Other spiritualities promote self-awareness as the path to
true redemption. Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby has employed survey
data to create a composite template of such spiritualities. He found
people who defined religion as:
… a matter relating to our inner-self or soul …a
feeling of oneness with the earth and all that is within me … the
existence of an immortal soul that has to be cared for … positive
thinking and excitement … can be religious or the beauty of nature or
the love of family and friends … a feeling that a force controls the
universe … the human spirit and goodness of all humanity … recognition
and nurturing of the needs of the soul .. a feeling of being whole and
at peace with my experiences in life … inner awareness … my presence and
communication with the world around me ….[xlviii]
Now, on the one hand, we must
beware of falsely dichotomizing transcendence and immanence. The
biblical God is both transcendent and immanent. “The word is very near
you,” the Book of Deuteronomy says, “it is in your mouth and your heart
for you to observe” (Dt 30:14.) In Christianity, God must be deeply
experienced and one of the real problems with Christendom,
Kierkegaard argued, was too little subjective awareness of God, not too
much. The issue is not whether we will experience God but the origin and
content of such experience. Modern day spiritualities, Christian or
otherwise, that are heavily immanentist tend to be hostile to the very
notions of sin, repentance, judgment and ethical decision that are
critical to Kierkegaard’s Christian vision. If God has been inside of us
all along, just waiting to be discovered, then there is no fundamental
breach between the self and God that needs to be healed and conversion
is unnecessary. It is easy to understand the attractiveness of such
spiritualities; but, from a Kierkegaardian perspective, they exact a
terrible and eternal toll because they alienate the self from the very
God they seek to find.
Personal Transformation
Søren Kierkegaard addressed
what he saw as the “spiritlessness” of an all-pervasive Christendom in
which people inherited church membership simply as an accident of birth.
One might argue that our situation is so different from his that his
critique is no longer really relevant. Furthermore, the theological
weaknesses in Kierkegaard’s obsessive and ahistorical concern with the
individual have been noted.[xlix]
Nor can one imagine his work standing alone as an adequate blueprint for
the church or the Christian life. But Kierkegaard’s main concern was not
the specifics of a particular configuration of religious and social
institutions but an ever-present temptation within Christianity to flee
from the authentic inwardness that is at the heart of the Gospel; in
effect, to enjoy the benefits without counting the cost. To not count
the cost, however, is, ironically, to lose the benefits. In that regard,
Kierkegaard’s critique retains its bite for those of us who try to live
a life of faith amidst the ruins of Christendom because he can make us
aware of our own evasive maneuvers.
Kierkegaard reminds us of
something often forgotten: that Christ came to change individuals.
Faithful Churches will lead individuals on a pilgrimage of
transformation, and their preaching, teaching and pastoral care will be
oriented to such a task. While authentic Christian faith is not
“private” (“Me and Jesus”) it is deeply personal because it is concerned
with persons in relation to God. One of liberal Protestantism’s foremost
evasive maneuvers is to play off issues of individual and social
salvation against one another as if they were mutually exclusive. There
is a kind of Protestant piety that dismisses personal morality as
inconsequential compared to the need to combat the systemic evils of
society. Kierkegaard would regard this as a false dichotomy and pure
avoidance. The individual is the basic category of spiritual value and
rightly constituted communities consist of individuals rightly related
to God. Part of the hypocrisy of present-day Christianity is that it
denigrates personal conversion under the guise of social concern, while
embracing the more narcissistic elements of the modern therapeutically
constituted self. The church today, as in Kierkegaard’s time, ought to
be guiding individuals into conformity with the life of Jesus Christ. In
this way, Christian communities will be healed.
In no way is this sectarian,
however. Whenever the church has emphasized spiritual maturity, it has
always been vulnerable to the charge of elitism.[l]
True Christian conversion, however, changes the individual but gives no
grounds for boasting because the source of change is God and not the
self. It is an event of grace. Consequently, when individuals are
related authentically to Christ, they will offer themselves in humble
service rather than claiming a privileged status. “Only love of one’s
neighbour truly leads to life,” Kierkegaard reminds us.[li]
We began with the question of
salvation and we have proceeded on the assumption that it remains the
basic question of faith today. We have explored how Søren Kierkegaard
analyzed the failure of the established church of his own time to
address this question adequately and how it devised a set of strategies
to free it from the responsibility of doing so. Kierkegaard can assist
the church today by helping us to be more aware of the tactics we use to
evade that same question. Sometimes this evasiveness involves
marginalizing the question altogether so that salvation itself becomes a
peripheral concern. Sometimes it is by defining salvation in such a way
that it can be achieved with effortless ease and no cost to the
believer. Sometimes it is by way of viewing salvation as a kind of
enclosure safely separating the “saved” from the “lost.” Sometimes it is
by equating salvation with the prevailing assumptions and values of
one’s group. Evasive maneuvers take different forms in different
contexts because they are the antithesis of faith which is always lived
out contextually. So, while our situation may be quite different from
Kierkegaard’s, our tendency to look for evasive strategies and our
inventiveness in creating them remains constant. In this regard,
Kierkegaard is a faithful friend who continues to call us to account.
[i] John W. Elrod,
Kierkegaard and Christendom, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981), 71.
[ii] Kierkegaard,
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, David F. Swenson and
Walter Lowrie, trans., (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1941, 1974), 325.
[iii] Kierkegaard,
“Where all are Christians, Christianity eo ipso does not
exist” in Attack Upon “Christendom”, Walter Lowrie,
trans., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944, 1968)
166-167.
[iv] Training in
Christianity, Walter Lowrie, trans., (New York: Vintage
Books, 1941, 2004), 39.
[v] See, for
example, Thomas G. Bandy, Road Runner: The Body in Motion
(Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002), 17-30.
[vi] This is an
observation based on 24 years in pastoral ministry. I don’t know
that it has been measured in any systematic way, but I believe
it’s an accurate assessment.
[vii]
Philosophical Fragments: Or, a Fragment of Philosophy, David
Swenson, trans., (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1936,
1962), 46-67.
[viii] There is
perhaps no purer Kierkegaardian text in the twentieth century
than Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s letter to his friends in 1941
entitled “Ten Years After”: “Who stands fast? Only the man whose
final standard is not his reason, his principles, his
conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to
sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible
action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God.” Letters
and Papers from Prison, Enlarged edition, (New York:
Macmillan, 1953, 1967, 1971), 5.
[ix] Kierkegaard
saw “spiritlessness” as the major malaise of modernity. Mark C.
Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard,
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 24.
[xv] Charles
Taylor, Hegel, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975), 83.
[xvi] Taylor,
Journeys to Selfhood, 24.
[xvii] It has been
remarked that Kierkegaard did not read Hegel himself so much as
the work of Hegel’s Danish followers like J. L. Heiberg and H.
L. Martensen (Steven M. Emmanuel, Kierkegaard and the Concept
of Revelation (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York
Press, 1996), 30: also, Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood,
147-148) and that Kierkegaard did not fully appreciate what
Hegel was saying. Charles Taylor, in his fine study of Hegel,
makes clear that the German philosopher in no way discounted the
significance of the individual. In fact, the only way in which
Geist, or Spirit, can appear is in concrete particulars
(Taylor, Hegel, 210.) But I think it is safe to say that,
for Hegel, the universal and the communal was ultimately of
greater importance than the individual who could never hope to
do more than play a fleeting role in the manifestation of
Geist.
[xviii] “To be a
particular individual is world-historically absolutely nothing,
infinitely nothing – and yet, this is the only true and highest
significance of a human being.” Postscript, 134. See also
Elrod, Kierkegaard and Christendom, 47.
[xix]
Postscript, 136-137.
[xxi] On
Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler, Walter Lowrie,
trans., (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1941, 1994), 160-161.
[xxii] “The Case of
the Contemporary Disciple,” Philosophical Fragments,
68-88.
[xxiii] Peter Gay,
The Enlightenment: An Interpretation 2 volumes (New York,
London: W.W.Norton & Company, 1966); Ernst Troeltsch,
“Historical and Dogmatic Method in Theology” in Religion and
History, James Luther Adams and Walter F. Bense, trans.
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1991), 11-32.
[xxiv] Van Harvey,
The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical
Knowledge and Christian Belief, (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1966)
[xxv] The Book
on Adler, 133.
[xxvii] Thomas
Cahill, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and
After Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 73.
[xxxi] Taylor,
Journeys to Selfhood, 131.
[xxxii] Charles
Taylor describes Hegel’s goal as overcoming the oppositions
between subject and world, freedom and virtue, infinite and
finite and the individual and society in one complete
philosophical system, (Hegel, 127, 79.)
[xxxiii] Albert
Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical
Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (1906) 3rd
edition, W. Montgomery, trans., (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 79.
[xxxvi] “Frequently
in this world , the question ‘What is love?’ has been asked out
of curiosity; and frequently there has been an idle fellow who
in answering has latched onto the curious fellow, and these two,
curiosity and idleness, think so much of each other that they
almost never tire of asking and answering.” Works of Love,
103.
[xxxviii] Elrod,
Kierkegaard and Christendom, 47; Taylor, Journeys to
Selfhood, 91, 100.
[xl]
Philosophical Fragments, 11.
[xlviii] Reginald
Bibby, Restless Churches: How Canada’s Churches Can
Contribute to the Emerging Religious Renaissance (Toronto:
Novalis Publishing, 2004), 89.
[xlix] Jurgen
Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and Implications of
Christian Eschatology, James W. Leitch, trans.,
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1965, 1993), 29.
[l] Philip J. Lee,
Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 33-40.
