Volume 10, Tome II: Kierkegaard's Influence on Theology

Anglophone and Scandinavian Protestant Theology

Jon Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138249646
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351875417
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Kierkegaard has always enjoyed a rich reception in the fields of theology and religious studies. This reception might seem obvious given that he is one of the most important Christian writers of the nineteenth century, but Kierkegaard was by no means a straightforward theologian in any traditional sense. He had no enduring interest in some of the main fields of theology such as church history or biblical studies, and he was strikingly silent on many key Christian dogmas. Moreover, he harbored a degree of animosity towards the university theologians and churchmen of his own day. Despite this, he has been a source of inspiration for numerous religious writers from different denominations and traditions. Tome II is dedicated to tracing Kierkegaard's influence in Anglophone and Scandinavian Protestant religious thought. Kierkegaard has been a provocative force in the English-speaking world since the early twentieth century, inspiring almost contradictory receptions. In Britain, before World War I, the few literati who were familiar with his work tended to assimilate Kierkegaard to the heroic individualism of Ibsen and Nietzsche. In the United States knowledge of Kierkegaard was introduced by Scandinavian immigrants who brought with them a picture of the Dane as much more sympathetic to traditional Christianity. The interpretation of Kierkegaard in Britain and America during the early and mid-twentieth century generally reflected the sensibilities of the particular theological interpreter. Anglican theologians generally found Kierkegaard to be too one-sided in his critique of reason and culture, while theologians hailing from the Reformed tradition often saw him as an insightful harbinger of neo-orthodoxy. The second part of Tome II is dedicated to the Kierkegaard reception in Scandinavian theology, featuring articles on Norwegian and Swedish theologians influenced by Kierkegaard.

Part I
Anglophone Theology

Edward John Carnell:
A Skeptical Neo-Evangelical Reading

Silas Morgan

Edward John Carnell’s academic life began and ended with the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. His Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy from Boston University was entitled The Problem of Verification in Sören Kierkegaard,¹ and its redacted version, The Burden of Søren Kierkegaard,² appeared in 1965 only a few years before his death. His reflection on numerous topics important to apologetics, theology, and philosophy of religion is embedded inside his indebtedness to, and his disagreement with, Kierkegaard’s theology of existential faith, truth as subjectivity, and critique of Christian culture. He was rather convinced that Kierkegaard too easily jettisoned public evidences from the analysis of Christian theological claims in his embrace of paradox, subjectivity, and dialectics as markers of Christianity. For Carnell, God, as the proper object of Christian faith, is a verifiably historical fact that can be confirmed through the inner witness of the subject’s heart. Kierkegaard disagrees: God is unknown and is not accessible via the conceited human attempts to rationally explain or account for god for the sake of their own intellectual prowess.³ God is such that existence cannot be proven; faith, then, is paradox that offends the rational sensibility of the human person, calling the subject into a place of restless dread and painful risk.⁴ Clearly, these theologians differ.

I. Biographical Summary

Edward John Carnell (1919–67) was one of the great American neo-evangelical theologians of the mid twentieth century. A fundamentalist early in his academic career, Carnell gradually distanced himself, staking claim to a new confession for conservative theology, but without the rhetoric and harsh attitudes of fundamentalism that carnell found distasteful. He served in various professorial roles at several institutions, but made his mark as a faculty member and then president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, during its most formative early years. A scholar of the highest level, his efforts were primarily in the area of apologetics, the philosophical defense of the Christian faith. He published nine books, most of which were innovative and creative attempts to reform the Christian apologetic account in light of developments in American neo-evangelicalism. He was also a frequent contributor to influential Christian publications like the Christian Century and Christianity Today, both of which were born during the rise of the neo-evangelical movement in the mid-twentieth century.

After studying philosophy with Gordon Clark (1902–85) at Wheaton College, Carnell attended Westminster Theological Seminary and was mentored by professors John Murray (1898–1975) and Cornelius Van Til (1895–1987). Participating in the fundamentalist interest to engage broader religious and cultural discourse, in 1948 Carnell received a Th.D. from Harvard Divinity School in philosophy of religion and history, after writing his dissertation on the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), a volume eventually published as The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr (1950).⁵ He also managed to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University the same year, writing a dissertation on Kierkegaard’s religious epistemology under the instruction of Edgar S. Brightman (1884–1953). He shortly thereafter joined the young and adventurous faculty at Fuller Seminary, where he would eventually serve as president and remain as professor of ethics and philosophy of religion until 1967, the time of his untimely and strange death at the age of 47.⁶

His 1948 publication, Introduction to Christian Apologetics,⁷ was the first of many books and won a prestigious award, catapulting him to the forefront of the progressive evangelical movement. His subsequent work on apologetics included A Philosophy of the Christian Religion (1952),⁸ Christian Commitment (1957),⁹ The Case for Orthodox Theology (1960),¹⁰ and The Kingdom of Love and the Pride of Life (1960).¹¹

His rising status made him an excellent selection to lead the newly formed ascendant Fuller Theological Seminary. Carnell appreciated the opportunity but longed for the ease of the academic life of teaching and scholarship.¹² During his administration, Carnell established himself as a forceful advocate for progressive reform of fundamentalism in order to end the cultic practices and attitudes infused in their negative theology of legalism. His courageous offensive against fundamentalism can not only be found in his speeches but is the foundation of all of his published work.¹³ He sought to create space for a conservative theological voice that championed orthodoxy without the ideological thinking, totalitarian spirit of conceptual control, and obsessive fear of heresy among creative and innovative theologies.

II. The Reception of Kierkegaard in the Work of Edward John Carnell

A. An Introduction to Christian Apologetics (1948)

Carnell’s earliest publication, An Introduction to Christian Apologetics (1948), was a significant catalyst for his ascendance into the ranks of evangelical scholarship. Demonstrating his early interest in making the claims of Christianity respectable to outside forms of discourse, Carnell employed a philosophical strategy instead of a religious defense. Writing that “the aim of this volume is to discharge the obligation... by showing how Christianity is able to answer the fundamental questions of life as adequately as, if not more adequately than, any other world-view,”¹⁴ Carnell argues for a coherence epistemology in order systematically to offer a philosophical response to the basic problems of apologetics: the nature of truth, the definition of faith, and the nature of proof. In the interest of constructing and defending “the Christian world-view,” Carnell laid out a vision for the theological and philosophical defense of the Christian faith against other religious and philosophical world-views that seek to answer the same questions. But, it is also important to Carnell to claim that conservative Christianity is able to make sense of the world and the human experience of it, as diverse and complex as that may be, better than any other system of belief. Addressing questions like science, miracles, natural law, evil, and immorality, Carnell was eager to contend that Christianity is able to give reasonable explanations that are both deeply philosophical and practical. This book demonstrates Carnell’s early interest in matters similar to Kierkegaard; it also documents his indebtedness to Kierkegaard, despite his early dissatisfaction with his positions on key issues.¹⁵

Kierkegaard’s particularly existential interest in questions of truth and faith clearly intrigued Carnell given his dissertation on the topic. And yet the reasons for his dissatisfaction with Kierkegaard’s treatment become clear. The well-being of humanity is based on three principles one of which is the knowledge of truth, whereby normativity can be tested and established. Carnell defines truth as “a judgment, which corresponds to things as they actually are.”¹⁶ Theologically applied, this formulation means that “truth is a property of that judgment which coincides with the mind of God...Truth for the Christian, then is defined as correspondence with the mind of God.”¹⁷ This truth must be tested. Carnell employed the principle of systematic consistency; this is basically the argument for coherence. “A judgment is true and may be trusted when it sticks together with all the facts of our experience, while a judgment is false when it cannot.”¹⁸ Based on the law of non-contradiction, something is true only after the law has been systematically applied and both the formal and material facts cohere to meaningful reality as established by the mind of God. The centrality of the law of contradiction looms large for Carnell’s reading of Kierkegaard’s use of paradox and dialectic in his epistemology.¹⁹ Carnell’s resistance to Kierkegaard’s ideas can be traced to his insistence on the primacy of this logical principle. “Without consistency,” Carnell argued, “we have absolutely no way of telling the voice of the fool from the voice of the expert. The first element in any system of truth, therefore, is consistency.”²⁰

Convinced that “the division between faith and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I ANGLOPHONE THEOLOGY
• PART II SCANDINAVIAN THEOLOGY
• Index of Persons
• Index of Subjects