Volume 15, Tome I: Kierkegaard's Concepts

Absolute to Church

Steven M. Emmanuel, William McDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351875059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Epistemologie in der Philosophie

Kierkegaard's Concepts is a comprehensive, multi-volume survey of the key concepts and categories that inform Kierkegaard's writings. Each article is a substantial, original piece of scholarship, which discusses the etymology and lexical meaning of the relevant Danish term, traces the development of the concept over the course of the authorship, and explains how it functions in the wider context of Kierkegaard's thought. Concepts have been selected on the basis of their importance for Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy, theology, the social sciences, literature and aesthetics, thereby making this volume an ideal reference work for students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines.

Christ

Leo Stan

Christ or Jesus Christ (Jesus—noun; Christus—noun)

The name Jesus was imported into English from the Latin Iesus, which is a mere transliteration of the Greek Ἰησοῦς. The latter is a cognate of the original Hebrew name, Yeshua, which in its turn represents the contraction of Yehoshua, “Yahweh is salvation.” Accordingly, Joseph is told by the angel of the Lord to name Mary’s divine child “Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.“¹ As to the appellation “Christ,”² it originates from the Latin Christus and the Greek Χριστός (the anointed one), which is the title the disciples attributed to Jesus upon the realization that he was the Messiah or the promised liberator.³ More often than not, in the New Testament Χριστός is used as Jesus’ other name.⁴

Kierkegaard embraces Christ as both the redemptive embodied deity and the suffering exemplar, who posits the possibility of deliverance as well as the task of imitation.⁵ Thus, while strictly abiding by the letter of the Christian doctrine, he endorses the godly qualities of Christ, but he also insists—this time in step with the Nicene Creed—that Christ’s genuine divinity cannot be separated from his humanity. Given the soteriological orientation of his thought, the references to the redeeming exemplar literally pervade Kierkegaard’s entire literary corpus. However, the works wherein Christ takes center stage are Philosophical Fragments, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, Works of Love, Christian Discourses, Two Ethical-Religious Essays, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, Practice in Christianity, and Judge for Yourself!⁶

As a consistently Christian author, Kierkegaard does not hesitate to proclaim Jesus Christ as God incarnate or the truth.⁷ From a Trinitarian standpoint, this means that Jesus is consubstantial with the absolute Creator.⁸ In a doctrinally correct fashion, Kierkegaard also identifies him with “the Way and the Truth and the Life,”⁹ or with the heavenly Son whose will never departed from that of the Father.¹⁰ Thirdly, Christ is the one and only redeemer,¹¹ the sole hope for the irrevocable annihilation of fallenness. Following the Johannine tradition, Kierkegaard calls Jesus the Word or the highest name of the absolute.¹² As the channel for God’s grace,¹³ Christ represents the summit of creation¹⁴ or, as Kierkegaard poetically puts it, the immortal sun of mankind.¹⁵ Jesus’ divinity can also be glimpsed from his ascension to heaven,¹⁶ which is yet another quintessentially Christian postulate of Kierkegaard’s fideism.

To wit, Kierkegaard ascribes to Christ the three absolute qualities of God: omnipresence, omniscience, and all-powerfulness. He points to the Savior’s ubiquity when dealing with the ways in which genuine followers can aspire to the celestial realm.¹⁷ Moreover, after the heavenly ascent, Christ becomes contemporary with everything in history; this grants him a perspective on the world that no one else could ever enjoy.¹⁸ Kierkegaard goes further and views Jesus as omniscient as God in the awareness of sin and human evil.¹⁹ Thus, it is by virtue of this absolute comprehension that Jesus prophetically knew his earthly fate.²⁰ The Redeemer is all-knowing from an additional standpoint since he has full access to the innermost recesses of every single individual.²¹

In view of the third attribute mentioned above, Kierkegaard declares that the Father and the Son share the same absolute authority.²² Yet, unlike God, Christ, by becoming a historical individual, freely chooses to hide completely his divine fortitude (and therefore become utterly unrecognizable) in order to test one’s faith.²³ With that in mind, Kierkegaard unrelentingly underscores the incommensurability between Christ’s all-powerfulness and immediacy. His argument is that, were it not so, the struggle of faith would have been severely diluted since it is far easier to believe after having physically witnessed the Savior’s glory. As it happens, it is immeasurably more difficult to appropriate the absurd faith that the absolute ruler of creation has incarnated himself into a humble servant. So, regardless of the existential difficulties, Christians must believe that the God-man kenotically relinquished his omnipotence²⁴ and expiated sinfulness through suffering, forsakenness, and death. Be that as it may, by claiming—indeed, pseudonymously—that no one was ever privy to Christ’s splendor during his earthly journey,²⁵ Kierkegaard runs the risk of contradicting the famous episode of transfiguration, to which all synoptic Gospels unambiguously testify.²⁶

Inasmuch as Kierkegaard’s thought is fundamentally soteriological, the most salient function of the God-man is that of savior. In this regard, Kierkegaard again lacks all trace of skepticism; he is sure that Christ “came into the world out of love in order to save the world.“²⁷ Obviously, the savior, while permanently concerned for humanity’s reconciliation with God after the advent of sin,²⁸ is able to effectuate redemption by virtue of his loving divinity.²⁹ In this precise sense, he represents the selfless giver of mercy,³⁰ the forgiver par excellence,³¹ while his disposition to pardon is relentless and thus open to everyone.³²

The Kierkegaardian redeemer is therefore the suffering deity who atones for all the evil in world,³³ thereby restoring humankind to its original dignity. As holy, the immaculate Christ ³⁴ is the only one able to expunge the maculation of sin. Christ’s atonement is a kenotic self-sacrifice,³⁵ the contradictory crux of which gives added momentum to Kierkegaa...