Emerging Prophet

Kierkegaard and the Postmodern People of God

Roberts

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621896296
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Kierkegaard was a prophet who critiqued Christendom, the perversion of authentic, New Testament Christianity into the institutionalized, materialistic, triumphalist, and flabby religion of modernism. Emergent Christianity is attempting to carve out a more authentic way of being Christian and doing church within--and beyond--the ineffectual, institutionalized church of modernity. In many ways, Kierkegaard's critiques, concerns, and goals overlap with emergent Christianity and the emerging church. For the first time, this book brings Kierkegaard into a dialogue with various postmodern forms of Christianity, on topics like revelation and the Bible, the atonement and moralism, and the church as an apologetic of witness. In conversation with postmodern philosophers, contemporary theologians, and emergent leaders, Kierkegaard is offered as a prophetic voice for those who are carving out an alternative expression of the New Testament today and attempting to follow Christ through works of love.

Chapter One

Reclaiming Revelation

“The Holy Scriptures are the highway signs, Christ is the way.”22

Kierkegaard’s critique of nineteenth-century Danish Christianity’s capitulation to modernist epistemology revolved, in large part, around its theologically inadequate understanding of the Bible and of divine revelation. His critical analysis of nineteenth-century Christianity and his dynamic view of the nature of Scripture serve as a resource for contemporary theology and postmodern Christians in articulating a compelling doctrine of Scripture today. Much of the Christian church seems wedged between two boulders: On the one side, modernity’s capitulation to Western rationality (in both its liberal and conservative forms) with its “inflated sense of epistemic certainty”;23 on the other, the temptation now present in some expressions of postmodernism to succumb to relativity and hermeneutical nihilism, thereby relinquishing any epistemic ground for religious practice and theological belief. In the face of both tendencies, Kierkegaard has this to say: God still speaks. Are you listening?

A temptation within modernist forms of evangelical Christianity is to fall prey to bibliolatry, a form of cognitive idolatry, in which the words on the page (the locutions, in speech-act theory) of the Bible become the ultimate authority for the Christian life, usurping God. As N. T. Wright points out, the Bible’s authority derives from the authority of God, not the other way around; it is a derivative authority.24 Furthermore, in the Gospel of John, we find that a relationship with Jesus, not the Scriptures, is the means to salvation and relationship with God (John 5:39–40). In Kierkegaard’s view, the Bible primarily facilitates a relationship with Jesus; it is an occasion for confrontation with Christ. Kierkegaard’s prophetic call prompts the church to renew its understanding of Scripture as the living, breathing Word of God. This renewal requires at least three components: (1) a realization that, ultimately, revelation is about the person of Christ and is the relational disclosure of the living God; (2) an acknowledgment that the Bible’s authority derives from the authority of God; and (3) emphasis on one’s subjective relation to revelation. Only by subjective appropriation of revelation does it function for its intended purpose of facilitating authentic Christian existence. For Kierkegaard, the appropriation of the truth of revelation differs from mere application. Appropriation means making the truth your own; it is the personal assimilation of truth such that it transforms one’s self.25

A few preliminary observations must be noted: this means that Scripture should not become an object to master or an instrument of power and control, used to suppress or oppress others. Nor should it be treated solely as an “objective” text, useful for developing cognitive, academic theologies (or doctrine for doctrine’s sake). This chapter commends Kierkegaard’s view of revelation and biblical authority as a way beyond the impasse caused by, on the one hand, modernity’s capitulation to human reason (in both its liberal and fundamentalist forms) and, on the other hand, the temptation present in postmodernism to succumb to epistemic relativity or hermeneutic nihilism.26 Kierkegaard’s Scripture principle grounds the church in authoritative revelation without sacrificing the dynamic, passionate, and personal nature of the essentially Christian.

Kierkegaard and the Essentially Christian

For Kierkegaard, the essence of authentic Christian faith is captured in his phrase “the essentially Christian.” As Sylvia Walsh explains, “the essentially Christian is the rigor of existentially actualizing the qualifications of Christian existence.”27 The ideologies of modernity (modernism) neglected existential passion, or personal engagement with truth and the “actualizing” of knowledge. They did not recognize that genuine engagement with truth requires putting it into practice—what Kierkegaard called “reduplication.”28 In the hands of modernists, the substance of Christian faith was replaced by the idolatry (and ideologies) of rationalism, materialism, nationalism, and moralism. As a prophet of idol-deconstruction, Kierkegaard described his task as articulating the essentially Christian.29

The essentially Christian, then, is Christian faith lived with authenticity and rigor, stripped of the cumbersome layers of philosophical speculation, doctrinal accretions, and institutional dead weight. The essentially Christian is action, but a particular kind of action. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard says, “But the essentially Christian, which is not related to knowing but to acting, has the singular characteristic of answering and by means of the answer imprisoning everyone in the task.”30 To understand the essentially Christian is to grasp that Christianity calls us to action—ultimately, to the practice of self-denial and love, which involves faith, because it requires going “through offense.”31 It also requires the realization that Christianity is a quest, or—to use Kierkegaard’s own term—a “striving.” The essentially Christian is not doctrine, speculation, or intellectual reflection, each of which avoids the strenuousness of action.32

The Necessity of Divine Revelation for Authentic (Christian) Existence

Kierkegaard shared little of his contemporaries’ unbridled enthusiasm for the Enlightenment, of which Immanuel Kant’s sapere aude (“Dare to know!”) became the rallying cry. Objectivity and the explanatory power of rationality had been hailed as the harbinger of scientific progress and technological advancement; increasingly, this optimism transferred to the religious sphere as well. In the nineteenth century, during the precarious height of modernity, enthusiasm for the progresses of the Enlightenment was palpable and yet, in certain quarters (e.g., both orthodox and pietistic forms of Christianity and Romantic streams of philosophy) it was already waning. In the nineteenth century, some philosophers and theologians began to critique this (modernist) triumphalism, optimism, and faith in the power of human rationality. The twentieth-century existentialist movement, which hails Kierkegaard as a forerunner, was in large part a response to the failed optimism of modernity regarding historical progress on the basis of supposedly objective rationality. In the rush to proclaim the advent of universal reason, thinkers deluded by the power of human reason had both overestimated and underestimated the capabilities of finite, human people in the acquisition and application of knowledge. They overestimated the capacity of human reason to master the world via attainment of universal and comprehensive knowledge; and they underestimated the influence of the human passions (“subjectivity”) and the negative factor of human sin in the quest for truth and mastery over the world (and each other). Kierkegaard rejected the common assumption that the maximization of the potentials of human rationality was sufficient for cultural progress and—more importantly—for individual human fulfillment (or becoming a self). For Kierkegaard, the age of reason had forgotten the necessity of divine revelation.

Nonetheless, the tension between faith and reason, so acutely recognized since...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Reclaiming Revelation
• Chapter 2: Against Certainty
• Chapter 3: Reclaiming Imagination
• Chapter 4: Against Moralism
• Chapter 5: Reclaiming Love
• Chapter 6: Against Christendom
• Conclusion
• Bibliography