A final ramble on Kierkegaard

I may have been wrong on the extent of Kierkegaard's influence on Barth, but I'm in good company. Although there are some influences on Barth's early work, it seems he broke with him in some ways later on. This is Barth:

I consider him to be a teacher into whose school every theologian must go once. Woe to him who has missed it! So long as he does not remain in or return to it!

I'm probably going to take a little break from Kierkegaard, although I may return at some point because he's for grown ups too. But I should end on a high...

Kierkegaard is piercing in his analysis of humanity and Christians in particular. His uncompromising, rigerous hammering of the radical, even impossible, call to faith and Christian living is an experience in itself if you read his work. And it is his work that you should read, even if you need a good deal of support to make heads or tails of it (I recommend Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh as guides). As Sylvia Walsh ends her book:

it is important to read his works first of all on their own terms, that is, as indirect communications to the reader, 'that single individual', for the sake of personal appropriation, rather than as theological fodder that must be translated into some other theological framework in order to have contemporary relevance. Only then will Kierkegaard be truly read for the first time, even though we may have read him many times previously (p.206 - something that could also be said of the Bible).

So after that ramble, here is a passage which gave me hope after he'd skewered me with his Biblical idealism of what it means to be a Christian:

And what does all this mean? It means that everyone for himself, in quiet inwardness before God, shall humble himself before what it means in the strictest sense to be a Christian, admit candidly before God how it stands with him, so that he might yet accept the grace which is offered to everyone who is imperfect, that is, to everyone. And then no further; then the rest let him attend to his work, be glad in it, love his wife, be glad in her, bring up his children with joyfulness, love his fellow men, rejoice in life. If anything further is required of him, God will surely let him understand, and in such case will help him further; for the terrible language of the Law is so terrifying because it seems as if it were left to man to hold fast to Christ by his own power, whereas in the language of love it is Christ that holds him fast. So if anything further is required of him, God will surely let him understand; but this is required of everyone, that before God he should candidly humble himself in view of the requirements of ideality...

"But if the Christian life is something so terrible and frightful, how in the world can a person get the idea of accepting it?" Quite simply, and, if you want that too, quite in a Lutheran way: only the conciousness of sin can force one into this dreadful situation - the power on the other side being grace. And in that very instant the Christian life transforms itself and is sheer gentleness, grace, loving-kindness, and compassion. Looked at from any other point of view christianity is and must be a sort of madness or the greatest horror. Only the consciousness of sin is the entrance to it, and the wish to enter in by any other way is the crime of lese-majeste against Christianity.

(pp. 61-62, Training in Christianity)

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)

Proofs for the existence of God

C. Stephen Evans explains why there is a difference between proving the existence of the Loch Ness Monster and God:

Religious belief is presumed to be not innocent, but guilty until proven otherwise. Unless we can prove God's existence we must refrain from believing.

People who think like this imagine the religious situation to be something like the following: Suppose you are having an argument with someone over how many species of animals there are. Both of you agree that there are many species-cats, dogs, cows, and so on. You, however, believe in one species which your opponent does not believe in, say, the species of monsters residing in the Loch Ness. Your opponent claims that the burden of proof is on you if you want to believe in such monsters. Without strong positive evidence you would do better to refrain from believing in the Loch Ness monster.

Perhaps in this situation the burden of proof would be on you to come up with evidence for your belief. Perhaps if that evidence is less than conclusive, it would be wiser to suspend or withhold judgment. After all, we don't usually believe in monsters if we have no evidence of their reality. But belief in God is not at all comparable to belief in such a monster.

One important difference is that the Loch Ness monster is merely "one more thing." The two people that disagree about the monster agree about all the other animals. God, however, is not merely "one more thing." The person who believes in God and the person who does not believe in God do not merely disagree about God. They disagree about the very character of the universe. The believer is convinced that each and every thing exists because of God and God's creative activity. The unbeliever is convinced that natural objects exist "on their own," without any ultimate reason or purpose for being. In this situation there are no neutral "safe" facts all parties are agreed on, with one party believing some additional "risky facts." Rather, each side puts forward a certain set of facts and denies its opponents' alleged facts. There is risk on both sides.

A second important difference between the case of God and the case of the Loch Ness monster is that religious beliefs imply something fundamental about how life should be lived. Insofar as religious beliefs embody themselves in actions, suspending judgment is not possible. Even if it were possible to suspend judgment intellectually, it would by no means enable a person to avoid risk. It is clear that the faith of the religious believer and the faith of the atheist are equally risky. It is hard to see why any special burden of proof falls on the religious believer.

(pp.21-22, Why Believe? Reason and Mystery as pointers to God)

Evans is a Kierkegaard scholar, and this seems to echo the Dane's own thought:

The idea of proving the existence of God is of all things the most ridiculous. Either he exists, and then one cannot prove it (no more than I can prove that a certain human being exists; the most I can do is to let something testify to it, but then I presuppose existence) - or he does not exist, and then it cannot be proved at all.

Pointing out that 'it is generally a difficult matter to want to demonstrate that something exists', Climacus prefers the opposite approach:

Therefore, whether I am moving in the world of sensate palpability or in the world of thought, I always draw conclusions from existence, not to existence. For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but that the accused, who does indeed exist, is a criminal

(pp.55-56, Sylvia Walsh, Kierkegaard: Thinking Christianly in an existential mode)

Therefore, while it may be unjustifiable to ask whether God the Son exists, we can ask whether Jesus is God the Son. We, and the First Century Jews knew who God is through the Old Testament and through nature. Jesus showed that he was God the Creator and the God of Israel by his power and his love. He fitted, at least if you listened. I think this is what Peter Jensen (?) means by Christology from within [the Biblical narrative], rather than above or below.

Sorrow in heaven

There once lived a people who had a profound understanding of the divine; this people thought that no man could see the God and live. -- Who grasps this contradiction of sorrow: not to reveal oneself is the death of love, to reveal oneself is the death of the beloved!"

(Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments)

How happy must God have been to tear the curtain of the temple and stop hiding himself from humanity? Yet at the same time he must have been so sorrowful that it was at the cost of hiding himself from his beloved Son dying on the cross.

The tragic lily

"God takes pleasure in arraying the lily in a garb more glorious than that of Solomon; but if there could be any thought of an understanding here, would it not be a sorry delusion of the lily’s, if when it looked upon its fine raiment it thought that it was on account of the raiment that the God loved it? Instead of standing dauntless in the field, sporting with the wind, carefree as the gust that blows, would it not under the influence of such a thought languish and droop, not daring to lift up its head? It was the God’s solicitude to prevent this, for the lily’s shoot is tender and easily broken."

(Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments)

What a tragedy for us to delude ourselves like the lily and think that God loves us because of our loveliness when in reality we are lovely because God loves us.

Sadly though it is a delusion we find everywhere except the Gospel:

"Only in the gospel does love precede loveliness. Everywhere else loveliness precedes love." (Tullian Tchividjian)

A little fairy tale by Kierkegaard

Why doesn’t God make himself clearer?

In Philosophical Fragments Kierkegaard tells a parable which helps to answer the question. He admits it is not valid analogy (and the more I think about it the more I see its flaws), but he hopes that it will enlarge our imaginations so that we can begin to understand.

"Suppose there was a king who loved a humble maiden" he says. The trouble is that love cannot abide inequality between lovers ("love is exultant when it unites equals, but it is triumphant when it makes that which was unequal equal in love").

The king has three options in his pursuit of his beloved:

1. He can bring her up to his level. He can shower her with gifts and give her a title. But he will then be concerned that the love will be spoiled by the inevitable doubt in the maiden’s mind “do I really love him or just love him because of his gifts?” Therefore the king will not do this because he wants his love to be happy.
2. He can keep the inequality in their relationship. He can dazzle her with his glory and beauty while she remains in poverty. She will love him truly and be perfectly happy to be married to such a great king, but the king will not be happy because he wants to express his love and not just receive her love. He wants to glorify her and make her beautiful.
3. He can come down to her level. He can give up all his wealth and power, not just in a charade but truly. She will then be happy in her love for him, and he can express his love to her by giving her all that he has… even if now all he has to give is himself.

It is because of nature of the God that we have and the nature of relationship that he wants with us that he didn’t just pull us out of current situation, or display himself to his poor bride “in all the pomp of his power, causing the sun of his presence to rise over her cottage, shedding a glory over the scene”. If he revealed himself in a ‘clearer’ way, then it would be a different God and seeking a different relationship than the one who came as a servant.

“But the servant-form is no mere outer garment, and therefore the God must suffer all things, endure all things, make experience of all things. He must suffer hunger in the desert, he must thirst in the time of his agony, he must be forsaken in death, absolutely like the humblest -- behold the man His suffering is not that of his death, but this entire life is a story of suffering; and it is love that suffers, the love which gives all is itself in want. What wonderful self-denial!”

I may not have expounded the parable correctly, so you are welcome to read the chapter online yourself. It was hard going, even having heard a lecturer summarise it, but it is worth marvelling over. There are lots of jewels in the details.

The structure of sharing the Gospel

This is an attempt to explain some of the convictions I've gained about the structure of our attempts to share the Gospel with people. Because it is mainly about structure it only skims over the actual content which is the exciting part. It also misses the power which is all found in asking God the Father to act through his Word and Spirit. It also misses the context which should be a loving community of sinners with changed lives! It is also quite hastily written, so please forgive the errors, but feel free to pull it apart in a constructive way.

1. Prologomena - death

As we are both actors and those acted upon the law shows us both that we are sinners and sufferers. So we should connect with unfulfilled desires and with painful experiences as well as with guilt.

There are three ways in which this bad 'news' can be part of preaching:

1. Direct communication
• For example you can say, "you are a dirty rotten sinner" or "don't you feel really empty and purposeless without God?" This may be useful sometimes, but generally it is counter-productive. I think too much direct communication is what has given law-Gospel preaching a bad name.
2. Indirect communication
• To get past people's defences tell stories, make cultural references and make people so think that they end up telling themselves the bad news:
• Nathan told David a fable so that he convicted himself (2 Sam 12).
• Bizarrely God gave people a law which said "do this and live" for the purpose of increasing and convicting people of sin! The law may well be "indirect communication" par excellence.
• Tim Keller paints this beautiful picture of what friendship should be and his hearers are broken because as they apply it to their own lives they realise that it is something they have only tasted and barely experienced.
• Kierkegaard in The Point of View for My Work as an Author explains that you cannot communicate directly to one who is suffering under a delusion because "direct communication presupposes that the receiver's ability to receive is undisturbed". Instead you have to "deceive [!] a person into the truth", which means "one does not begin directly with the matter one wants to communicate, but begins by accepting the other man's illusion as good money". To natural legalists the law does just that, but it heightens our illusion to such an extent that is snaps.
3. Present beforehand
• Simeon Zahl comments that "the ‘Law’ is being preached by the Spirit as ‘negative’ experience long before the hearer enters the pew". People carry with them guilt and suffering that weighs them down before they hear anything explicitly Christian.
• GK Chesterton said that "original sin... is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved". It is not essential for the 'bad news' to be declared because it is already known and experienced (Romans 1). As Rob Bell has commented, many people already know an awful lot about hell from their experience

Although I believe in death before life, and bad news before good, I hope this shows that we should not simplistically or insensitively 'lay down the law' at the beginning of any sermon. Instead indirect communication and God's prior alien work can take precedence.

2. The Gospel - The source of Life

The bad news is our point of connection, but in contrast, while there are echoes and similarities of the Gospel in our experience, there is nothing that matches the "love unknown" of the Gospel. Because of this it must be declared and carry the life it promises with it.

The Gospel has three dimensions:

1. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit...
• The identity of God is the Gospel. God gave us not just to eternal life, but eternal life with him, which is good news only because he is so lovely.
2. ...acted in salvation in Jesus Christ who was "born of the Virgin Mary...crucified [but] On the third day he rose again [and] ascended into heaven"...
• The act of salvation is the Gospel. God did not just symphathise with us in our plight, but did something about it.
3. ...for us.
• That God and his acts are all directed in love towards us, and not someone else, is the Gospel.

People often seem to emphasise only one of the three and so risk losing the whole Gospel in the process. It is an useful thought experiment to think through which movements/teachers are strong on which point, and which we are weak on.

3. Our goal in preaching - The living of life

Again, in preaching we can aim for just one of the following and fail to have a holistic view of salvation.

1. New hearts
• Christianity is an affective faith. We love our God and desire to be with him.
2. New heads
• Christianity requires us to think differently about ourselves, our world and our God. We think through what it means that Jesus is Lord over every square inch of this world.
3. New hands
• We go out in words and deed as part of Christ's Gospel mission and in neighbourly love.

Again, it is an useful thought experiment to think through which movements/teachers are strong on which point, and which we are weak on.