Kierkegaard and Christian Faith

Paul Martens, C. Stephen Evans, Paul Martens, C. Stephen Evans

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781481304702, 9781481304702
• eBook ISBN: 9781481304726
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Kierkegaard and Christian Faith responds directly to the perennial and problematic concern of how to read Kierkegaard. Specifically, this volume presses the question of whether the existentialist philosopher, who so troubled the waters of nineteenth-century Danish Christendom, is a "Christian thinker for our time." The chapters crisscross the disciplines of philosophy, theology, literature, and ethics, and are as rich in argument as they are diverse in style. Collectively the chapters demonstrate a principled agreement that Kierkegaard continues to be relevant, even imperative. Kierkegaard and Christian Faith reveals just how Kierkegaard's work both defines and reconfigures what is meant by "Christian thinker."

Following an autobiographical prologue by Kathleen Norris, this volume gathers the chapters in pairs around crucial themes: the use of philosophy (Merold Westphal and C. Stephen Evans), revelation and authority (Richard Bauckham and Paul J. Griffiths), Christian character (Sylvia Walsh and Ralph C. Wood), the relationship between the church and the world (Jennifer A. Herdt and Paul Martens), and moral questions of forgiveness and love (Simon D. Podmore and Cyril O'Regan). The volume underscores the centrality of Christianity to Kierkegaard's life and thought, and rightly positions Kierkegaard as a profound challenge to Christianity as it is understood and practiced today.

1

An Introduction to False Pretenses, Søren Kierkegaard, and Trying on Faith for Size

Kathleen Norris

I would like to begin with an offer of two caveats. First of all, I am not a trained theologian: the last formal class I took on the subject of religion was a required course at Punahou School in Honolulu, when I was in the eighth grade. I still have one paper I wrote for that class: a cheeky reflection on what I grandly termed the “affair” between David and Bathsheba.

And second, I am no philosopher. I’m much happier making connections between disparate things than making distinctions between them. I’m not sure I even believe in dialectical opposition; I like to think that all things meet, eventually, even if we can’t always perceive how or where. And stories tend to stay in my head much longer than ideas. Once, after I had spent several months with a group of scholars at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Minnesota, a professor of philosophy became exasperated with me during a conversation and said, “All you do is tell stories!” And I immediately responded, in all earnestness, “What else is there?” I learned that this is probably the worst thing you can say to a philosopher.

But I did once try to study it. As a young woman at Bennington College, one of the most secular environments in America, I sought out both literature and philosophy in an attempt to nurture my spiritual life. But philosophy was—and is—a struggle for me. For example, one class at Bennington had me reading an entire book by Immanuel Kant; but now, although I know that Kant had one very big idea that had a significant influence on Western culture, for the life of me I can’t recall what it was. (I could have Googled it, I suppose, for the purpose of this essay, but I didn’t.) I continued taking philosophy courses at Bennington until I wrote a paper on the “philosophy” of William Blake, who of course was a mystic poet who saw angels in the trees of Hyde Park. My professor kindly suggested that I turn my full attention to the study of literature. So, I was basically kicked out of the philosophy department at Bennington. In the world of philosophical scholarship, I suspect that this is about as low as it gets.

But perhaps already in what I’ve said so far, you might have some idea of what attracted me to Søren Kierkegaard. If some of his Socratic thought-twisting made my head spin—and still does—I found in him a poetic creativity and sense of humor that greatly appealed to me. I really did develop a teenage crush on him. (For the record, I liked Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles as well.) My Kierkegaard infatuation began when I was about fifteen: I was browsing in a bookstore and can still remember the pale-yellow paperback titled Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death. I ask you, what teenaged girl could resist that? This one couldn’t. I found Kierkegaard addressing subjects I was desperate to know more about, even if I was too young to understand much about his world or his writing. It amuses me now to try to imagine what he would have made of the overly cerebral, precocious, and passionate girl I was then; most likely, he would have run for the hills, or maybe the wilds of Jutland.

When I was in high school, my family attended a very liberal United Church of Christ, whose adult classes were taught by the religion faculty of the University of Hawaii. It was there that I was introduced to the biblical interpretation of Rudolf Bultmann, and I didn’t much like all that de-mythologizing. On my own I discovered, and found refuge in, Evelyn Underhill’s masterful book Mysticism; and I also latched on to Kierkegaard and what I think of as his re-mythologizing of religion. The first thing I read by him was Fear and Trembling, and I was hooked, absolutely delighted at the way he could discuss Abraham and Isaac, suddenly introduce a merman and a young woman, and even admit that he could understand the merman whereas he could not understand Abraham. This was my kind of thing.

To do some re-mythologizing of my own, I’ll add that it is the archangel Raphael who makes sure that you find the people in your life you most need to find—and I believe the same is true for the writers we need. I needed Søren Kierkegaard when I was too young for him because I needed to hear what he had to say about boredom, despair, and trying to form a self and come to a mature religious faith.

As a fledgling writer, I was also attracted by his language, the magnificent power of his writing. Although I’d never say that I understand the full meaning of “the teleological suspension of the ethical,” I always did like the sound of it; it has what poets called a “good mouth-feel.” And I am grateful to Kierkegaard for introducing me to the word “eschatology.” In my book Amazing Grace, I write that I was “[a] scholarship student in an expensive school, a fish out of water, with little grasp of the complex culture of Hawaii, where my family had recently moved: ‘shark bait’ was common slang for pale-skinned, bookish kids like me. I took up Kierkegaard in self-defense, finding a kindred spirit in the eccentric Dane. For similar reasons I also embraced Emily Dickinson, and the two nineteenth-century recluses, in becoming my friends, plunged me into the world of ‘eschatology.’”

Later I discovered that the motto of the Norris family crest that my father found in England is “Regard the End.” It would seem that eschatology is in my blood. Or maybe my love for eschatology has to do with hope and my constitutional inability to do things right. The first time I was asked to preach to Presbyterians, I spoke about the communion of saints; the first time I addressed a gathering of Unitarians, I talked about sin. Often it is by doing things all wrong the first time that I make them come out right in the end. I have the feeling that Søren Kierkegaard would understand.

In a way, I had come to Kierkegaard all wrong—backward, as it were—plunging into his writing long before I had any way to understand it. The bite of Kierkegaard’s sarcasm was accessible to me and also attractive to a lonely teenager needing to feel superior to the high school jocks who called her a dog. I admired his scorn for Christians who had become too complacent in their faith, rendering it lifeless. I longed for a deep, all-encompassing faith. But above all, I loved the boldness of Kierkegaard’s claim to BOTH a poetic and a philosophical license, his calling Fear and Trembling a “dialectical lyric,” for example. I treasured the boldness of his proclamations—“Doubt is thought’s despair; despair is personality’s doubt”1—even if I had difficulty following the lengthy expositions that followed.

I admired Kierkegaard’s ability to cut like a laser through the superficial. It thrilled me to read that “to be unaware of being defined as spirit is precisely what despair is.”2 That I may have had fleshy football players and cheerleaders in mind as I read this matters far less than discovering Kierkegaard’s deep insight that “deep, deep within the most secret hiding place of happiness there dwells also anxiety, which is despair.”3 In a metaphor that helped me as an adolescent, and still instructs me when I am faced with the onset of a despondency whose causes are not easy to discern, Kierkegaard summons up a fairytale—or more accurately a troll tale—comparing despair “to the troll . . . who disappears through a crevice no one can see. . . . So it is with despair,” he writes, “the more spiritual it is, the more urgent it is to dwell in an externality behind which no one would ordinarily think to look for it.”4

But the question remains, why Kierkegaard, that sly and most exacting of thinkers, for a teenager with a spotty understanding of Christian tradition and a constitutional incapacity for philosophical rigor? Trying to cope with his dazzling array of categories, his atomized language, made my struggles with algebra seem easy. Well, to put it in Kierkegaardian terms, I gave up on algebra but persisted with the Dane because it was both absurd and necessary to do so. I felt a deep personal affinity with him that I could neither explain nor deny. If Søren Kierkegaard was an unlikely companion for a dreamy adolescent girl in 1960s Honolulu, he was also a kindred soul.

Like me, he harbored a hidden self that he felt would never be accepted or understood by his peers. He could conceal his melancholy by applying his wit and what he termed his “gift of dialectical clarity,” while I relied on the synthetic powers of metaphor and poetry. But the results were similar: a divided self, which could appear to be one person on the page and quite another in the world. From childhood on, I had frequently encountered what Kierkegaard describes as the “sadness of having understood something true—and then to find oneself only misunderstood.”5 Most adolescents feel lonely and misunderstood at one time or another, but when one’s otherness is repeatedly borne out in experience, it helps to have someone like Kierkegaard on your side. I would not have expressed this as starkly as did Kierkegaard, writing of the curse of “never to be allowed to let anyone deeply and inwardly join themselves to me.”6 But I was beginning to sense that my life would not unfold like that of my peers—that childbearing was out of the question, and marriage unlikely.

As a teenager I was no doubt misreading Kierkegaard much of the time. When I was asked to come up with a quotation to go under my senior photo in the school yearbook, I chose this: “When a man dares declare, ‘I am eternity’s free citizen,’ necessity cannot imprison him, except in voluntary confinement.”7 What can I tell you? It sounded good to me at seventeen; it seemed to point to the airy, intellectual freedom I aspired to. The significance of that “voluntary confinement” escaped me, as did the grit of Kierkegaard’s insight that true freedom develops out of discipline and a healthy respect for necessity. I was just a bratty kid who did not want to make her bed.

“Why bother?” I would ask my mother. “I’ll just have to unmake it again at night.” To me, the act was a meaningless repetition; to my mother, it meant offering hospitality to oneself. “You will feel better,” she said, “if you come home to an orderly room.” Of course, she was right. But I wouldn’t realize that for many years, when I could see my adolescent self more truly. Beneath that tough facade of a free and creative spirit, I was fearful. I was afraid to make my bed because having to do it again tomorrow would only make me sad. I was afraid to risk relationships because they might ask too much of me. When I took up Kierkegaard and clung to him for dear life, I was searching for a way to understand what I could not yet name, a personal confrontation with acedia, what the early Christian monks called “the noonday demon.” It is good to know that even in my adolescent fog I was looking in the right place, for Kierkegaard was a Protestant with an appreciation of early Christian theology as a taproot that might still provide good nourishment. In an 1839 journal entry, he wrote that he appreciated the “deep knowledge of human nature” that had led those monks to include the dreadful mixture of aridity and melancholy called “acedia” among the seven deadly sins.8 (Although the monks, God bless them, did not use the word “sin”—more accurately, they referred to these inner temptations as bad thoughts, or passions.)

Two other books by Kierkegaard that I treasured as a teenager—in a haphazard process of browsing and picking up whatever interested me—were Repetition and Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. The latter resonated deeply with me; even as a child I often felt like an observer, standing outside myself. The scholar Mary Louise Bringle notes that while Kierkegaard knew the Latin root of the word “despair,” as “that which is opposed to hope,” his native vocabulary would have offered another perspective, Danish words reflecting a sense that despair can also arise from the fundamental doubleness of the human spirit.9 Peter Kramer, in his book Against Depression, notes that Kierkegaard delineates “an element of melancholy that has had special meaning ever since, the alienated consciousness, always aware of its distance from authenticity, immediacy, and single-mindedness.”10

One of the jokes for me about Repetition is that I feel the need to read it over and over. The fear and scorn of repetition is at the heart of acedia, and Kierkegaard helped me to embrace repetition as a blessing rather than a curse. “Repetition is reality,” he writes, “and it is the seriousness of life . . . the daily bread which satisfies with benediction.”11 The first time I read Peter Rabbit to a niece, she solemnly commanded me to “read it again.” And imagine this: a small child who finds a penny on the floor of a post office, and then keeps moving the penny to several locations, proclaiming each time, “Look! I found a penny!” That story is not in the works of Kierkegaard—it’s something I once observed—but it might well be.

I mentioned Emily Dickinson earlier, as the other companion of my adolescence. She and Kierkegaard were contemporaries: he was seventeen when she was born; she was twenty-five and not yet a recluse when he died. They were both haunted by death and also by the sense that there is something eternal in the self. I have long fantasized about what they would have to say to each other, had they met.

They both perceived Christian faith as a dynamic force. Emily Dickinson wrote, “On subjects of which we know nothing . . . we both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.”12 I believe she would have resonated with Kierkegaard’s statement that “[f]aith means that what I am seeing is not here, and for that very reason I believe it. Faith signifies the deep, strong, blessed restlessness that believes so that he cannot settle down at rest in this world . . . a believer cannot sit still. A believer travels forward in faith.”13

They each found that their travels drove them far from shore, from the safe harbor of conformity. Amid the evangelical fervor at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Emily Dickinson sometimes found herself the only one in chapel resisting the call to declare oneself for Christ. She contended fiercely with others and with herself, experiencing at an early age the truth of Kierkegaard’s observation that “the majority of people are not so afraid of holding a wrong opinion, as they are of holding an opinion alone.”14 She did stand alone at Holyok...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. An Introduction to False Pretenses, Søren Kierkegaard, and Trying on Faith for Size
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index