Turned down pages on Kierkegaard

These are the passages I turned down the page corners for from Sylvia Walsh's astonishingly brilliant book Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an existential mode.

On faith and reason (incidentally he rejected Anselm's formula: Fides Quaerens Intellectum):

in order to believe against the understanding, one must use one's understanding, first of all, to understand what it means to break with the understanding (to understand that one cannot understand), and second to distinguish the Christian paradox [of the incarnation], which one believes, from nonsense, which one cannot believe against the understanding precisely because the understanding 'will penetratingly perceive that it is nonsense and hinder him in believing it'. (p.45)

On knowing God subjectively:

God is not an object or something external that can be perceived or known objectively, although that does not mean that God lacks independent reality. Rather God is a transcendent subject who is accessible to human beings only through a personal relationship in inwardness or subjectivity. In several late journal entries Kierkegaard even goes so far as to claim that 'God is pure subjectivity, sheer unmitigated subjectivity'. by which he means that 'intrinsically the divine has no trace at all of the objective' in itself and relates objectively only to its own subjectivity through self-reflecting, in which the divine subjectivity redoubles itself in an unconditioned, perfect objectivity. As an 'infinitely faint analogy' to what he sees as the deity's objective relation to itself, Kierkegaard cites Socrates' ability to relate to himself objectively as if he were an 'entirely separate third party' or another 'I' at the moment he was condemned to death. Kierkegaard observes that most people are subjective towards themselves and objective towards others, whereas 'the task is precisely to be objective towards oneself and subjective toward all others'. In other words, like God, we should relate to ourselves objectively in self-reflection, and to others, including god, subjectively as subjects or persons. (p.54)

I wonder if Kierkegaard can say that God is 'pure subjectivity' because God is Trinity.

On proofs for God:

neither Climacus nor his alter ego Kierkegaard finds the preoccupation with demonstrating the existence of God to be efficacious. Not only do the arguments fail, they distract us from focusing on our own personal relationships to God, which is where the existence of God truly becomes present to and is known by us. (p.58)

God is love implies a need for us to change:

for Kierkegaard...the main 'thesis of Christianity'[is] that God is love....But there is a twofoldness in the thesis that God is love inasmuch as God not only loves human beings but wants to be loved by them in return. Thus, in Kierkegaard's estimation it is 'pure nonsense' to suggest, as is commonly done in Christendom, that God is 'pure love' in the sense that the deity is transformed into likeness to humans without also seeking to to transform them into likeness to him. 'No that God is love means, of course, that he will do everything to help you to love him, that is to be transformed into likeness to him', he explains. The inducement for this reciprocity of love is the forgiveness of sins, which is the starting point for Christianity and the transition to loving God [But,] 'God must make you unhappy, humanly speaking, if he is to love you and you are to love him'. This is so, he suggests, because one cannot love God in addition to the world (pp. 66-67)

Love, not power, is what creates the demand:

'omnipotence made him come into existence, but love made him come into existence for God'. But unlike God's primal omnipotence, which requires nothing of a human being because a human being is nothing before it, God's omnipotent love also requires something of a human being otherwise there would be no reciprocity between them. This is the inverse of the common understanding of the relation of omnipotence and love to requirements, as omnipotence is generally associated with imposing rigorous requirements and love with being lenient. But as Kierkegaard sees it, the existence of God's infinite love must be presupposed 'in order for a person to exist in such a way for God that there can be any question of requiring anything of him' (p.71)

On God as an author:

God may also be likened to a poet in that 'poetically he permits everything possible to come forth' and puts up with all manner of evil, nonsense, wretchedness, mediocrity, etc. in the world'. But just as a poet should not be confused with the thoughts and actions of the characters in his or her poetic productions, one should not assume 'that God consents to all that happens and how' (p.76)

On the changelessness of God:

James 1:17-21, described by Kierkegaard as 'my first, my favorite, text'....The first sentence of this text provides the biblical basis for the Christian claim of God's changelessness: '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.' In the opening prayer of the discourse Kierkegaard subtly contrasts the changelessness of god in love, who is moved by everything but changed by nothing, to the unmoved mover of Aristotle which causes motion in the universe by being the object of desire or love but is not itself love or loving...The thought of God's changelessness is thus cause not only for 'sheerr fear and trembling' as to whether we are in conflict with his changeless will but also for 'sheer consolation' in that rest from our weary changeableness is to be found in it. (p.78)

On Philippians 2:

while it is within the ability of the human imagination as well as human reason to come up with the Christian idea of the incarnation without a revelation of God's love and desire for understanding and unity with human beings. (p.116)

On the atonement:

god put himself in our place by becoming a human being in order to truly be able to sympathize with us, which only divine sympathy is capable of doing. Second, unlike a merely human sympathizer, who has 'the universal and common limitation of being unable to put himself completely in another's place', the high priest of true sympathy is able to put himself completely in the sufferer's place in the sense of really being able to understand what the sufferer is going through and to comfort that person regardless of the nature of his or her sufferings. Christ is able to do this because he has suffered more than any other human being ever has or ever will suffer and has been tempted and even abandoned by God. Yet he is without sin, which is the only way Christ cannot put himself in our place and is infinitely different from us, who are all sinners. But Christ is able to put himself completely in our place in yet another way, namely by making satisfaction for our sin and guilt through his own suffering and death, suffering in our place the punishment for sin so that we may be saved and live. Addressing the reader directly, Kierkegaard asks:

Here it is indeed even more literally true that he puts himself completely in your place than in the situation we described earlier, where we indicated that he could completely understand you, but you still remain in your place, and he in his. But the satisfaction of Atonement means that you step aside and that he takes your place - does he not then put himself completely in your place?

When 'punitive justice here in the world or in judgment in the next' looks for us in the place where we stand as sinners, therefore, it will not find us, because we are no longer there and someone else stands in our place. (pp.135-136)

On Christ as 'gift' and 'example', picking up Luther's famous distinction:

with respect to Christ, Kierkegaard remarks in his journals: 'It is entirely clear that it is Christ as the prototype which must now be stressed dialectically, for the very reason that the dialectical (Christ as gift), which Luther stressed, has been taken completely in vain, so that the "imitator" in no way resembles the prototype but is absolutely undifferentiated, and then grace is merely slipped in'. Kierkegaard is quite conscious of having moved in the direction of Christ as pattern' in his writings and even cautions himself not to 'go astray by all too one-sidedly staring at Christ as the prototype'. Thus, while recognizing that 'the present situation calls for stressing "imitation"' he insists that 'the matter must above all not be turned in such a way that Christ now becomes only prototype and not Redeemer, No, the Atonement and grace are and remain definitive', for several reasons. One is that all our striving will be shown to be 'sheer paltriness' when we stand before God for judgement at the moment of death. Another is that grace is needed in order to prevent our striving from being transformed into an 'agonizing anxiety' that prevents us from striving. Perhaps the most important reason, however, is that we continue to sin while striving and therefore remain in unconditional need of the atonement. (p.138)

On Lessing's 'ugly ditch' between truths of history and truths of reason:

First and foremost, he denies that faith is knowledge, since 'all knowledge is either knowledge of the eternal, which excludes the temporal and historical as inconsequential, or it is purely historical knowledge, and no knowledge can have as its object this absurdity that the eternal is the historical' Here Climacus again applies the basic distinction of Liebniz, Lessing, and Hume between two types of knowledge: necessary, rational (demonstrative) eternal truths and contingent, empirical (probable), historical truths of fact. As Climacus sees it, faith does not fit into either of these categories, inasmuch as the object of christian faith is not an eternal truth that can be rationally known and comprehended, nor does it have the probability that is required for historical knowledge. On the contrary, 'the paradox specifically unites the contradictories, is the eternalizing of the historical and the historicizing of the eternal', which is not only objectively uncertain but objectively absurd from the standpoint of all human understanding...
As Climacus sees it, the object of faith is not a teaching about Christ that is to be comprehended through philosophy or theology but rather the teacher himself, who is the absolute paradox. (pp.155f)

On Christian love:

Christian love, by contrast, includes God as a third party or middle term in every love relation and actually makes God, who is love, the sole object of those relations...'To love God is to love oneself truly; to help another person to love God is to love another person; to be helped by another person to love God is to be loved'. (p.169)