Contemporary Theology I: Hegel to Death of God Theologies ST503 LESSON 10 of 24 John S. Feinberg, Ph.D. Experience: Professor of Biblical and Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. This is lecture 10 for the course Contemporary Theology 1. In the last few lectures, we ve been looking at Søren Kierkegaard s thinking. In particular, we have been looking at his concept of the different stages of life, and I have been illustrating his views by looking at several of his works. In this lecture, I want to turn to look at some of Kierkegaard s other key ideas. In particular, we are going to look at his concept of Christianity. We re going to look at what he has to say about the relationship between reason and faith, what he has to say about truth as subjectivity, and then I want to turn to one of his devotional writings, Training in Christianity, to catch a further glimpse of what he means by being a Christian. But before we do any of that, why don t we begin with a word of prayer? Thank You, Lord, again, for the privilege of study. We pray that as we look at what Kierkegaard has to say about the nature of Christianity, the nature of being a disciple, that we would examine our own hearts and our own lives and our walk with You. We pray, Lord, that this would be beneficial, not only to our understanding, but to our personal relationship with You. For it s in Jesus name we pray it. Amen. I want to turn, first of all, to look at Kierkegaard s concept of Christianity. I should say at the outset that most of what I m going to be saying in this lecture will focus on what Kierkegaard says in his works Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Now the copies of these two works that I have were published in 1971. You may have a much more recent edition, but the page numbers to which I ll be referring are to the 1971 editions. What does Kierkegaard have to say about the nature of Christianity? First of all, his concept of Christianity is one that is a very anti-hegelian conception. Hegel had said that philosophy presupposes Christianity. Hegel had said that philosophy 1 of 14
transfigures Christianity. Hegel s system indicates that truth resides within the person, and all that that person needs to do is just reflect upon what he knows, and eventually he will be able to reconstruct a system that includes all of reality. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, took a very different perspective on things. In The Fragments, pages 15-16, Kierkegaard says that philosophy and Christianity are two separate things, and neither of them presuppose the other. Kierkegaard also says that the nature of Christianity is such that neither philosophy nor anything else can touch it, let alone transfigure it, without making it into something other than true Christianity. In addition, Kierkegaard is very clear that he thinks that truth does not reside within the individual and that it only needs to be recollected. Instead, Kierkegaard says truth resides within God, and truth is given to man only in God s self-disclosure. As a result of that, no amount of philosophical reflection is ever going to give you the content of Christian truth. Philosophic reflection is one thing, Christianity is something altogether different. Kierkegaard makes these points in The Philosophical Fragments, pages 17-18. So his concept of Christianity is a very different one from Hegel s concept. He also conceives of Christianity as involving paradox. Kierkegaard says that Christian truths are neither analytic nor selfevident, nor are they synthetic or provable. If they were analytic, then their opposites would be contradictions, and that surely isn t the nature of Christian truth. Christian truth instead, he says, is paradoxical. It s above the analytic, synthetic distinction. It s neither of those kinds of truth. Now Kierkegaard says that Christian truth as paradoxical is not logically paradoxical. By that he means it doesn t involve logical contradictions. It s not irrational, but instead it is beyond reason. God is to be understood as the unknown limits to our rational powers. The mind can only go so far, and then it can t go any further. The point where reason can go no further is the point where Christian truth begins and it resides, according to Kierkegaard. So God and Christian truth are beyond reason, and they are paradoxical in that sense. We find that on page 55 in The Philosophical Fragments. Christian truth is also paradoxical, in that God s transcendence is approachable; that is, we always want to move rationally toward God, but it s also repulsive. By that, he means that we can t get to Him through reason alone, because He s beyond reason. Another thing that Kierkegaard would say in this matter of paradox 2 of 14
is that it s not only true that Christian doctrine is paradoxical, but Jesus Christ Himself is to be understood as the absolute paradox. Kierkegaard says that God is the unknown. He is beyond reason, and even though reason tries to understand Him, it can t. That God should reveal Himself to us by taking on human flesh is even more unthinkable. And what is most unthinkable is that God should be both God and man, a combination of the infinite and the finite, both the revealer and the hider of God at the same time. Kierkegaard says this is absolutely paradoxical. There is no way for human reason to penetrate this truth which, of course, is itself a miracle. One of the things that makes all of this so paradoxical, according to Kierkegaard, is the fact that Christ s humanity is real humanity. He doesn t just appear to be a human being; He really was a human being. If Christ had only been God in a disguise, then maybe we could have understood Him better; but His human form was a real human body, and because of that, it s even more paradoxical to think of Him as the God-man. Kierkegaard makes this point in The Philosophical Fragments, page 68. As Kierkegaard says, our response to Jesus Christ as the absolute paradox can either be a response of faith, or it can be a response of offense. And, of course, the best response, Kierkegaard would tell us, is the response of faith; but, remember, it s faith in the way that Kierkegaard has defined faith. Kierkegaard s understanding of Christianity, then, is anti- Hegelian. It is also a notion that involves paradox. But, in the third place, it is a notion that involves his view of the moment and the instant. Now these two words, the moment and the instant, have a very specific meaning in Kierkegaard s writing. The moment refers to the eternal, related to the temporal, when God enters Christ. This, then, is the historical moment when Christ came. He s talking here, of course, about the incarnation. The moment is also the paradox, according to Kierkegaard. The moment is absurd. We can t understand the incarnation. We can t understand the Godman. As opposed to the moment, there s also the instant. This is the point, says Kierkegaard, when God encounters the Christian in self-disclosure, and the Christian makes the subjective leap of faith to respond to Christ. From what I ve just said about the difference between the moment and the instant, it should be clear that there is only one moment, but there are, and there can be, 3 of 14
many instants. Let me now move on to another aspect of Kierkegaard s understanding of Christianity, and here I m going to take a little bit more time, because I think it s an important matter in Kierkegaard, but it s important for us as well. Kierkegaard also teaches that Christianity involves becoming a contemporaneous disciple of Christ. And I want to explain what he means by that. There is a lengthy discussion in The Philosophical Fragments about what it means to be a disciple of Christ and how your relationship to the life of Christ, historically, makes a difference or doesn t make a difference. Kierkegaard, for example, asked whether historical contemporaneity makes a person a disciple. In other words, do you wind up being a disciple of Jesus Christ just because you happened to live historically at the time when Christ walked this earth? Well, Kierkegaard says that the knowledge of the historical truths about Christ, in fact, even if you had been an eyewitness to the life of Christ, neither of those things would make you a disciple. Those sorts of things have historical significance, but they don t have any eternal consequence for the individual. Kierkegaard says, in addition, that even if you knew all of Christ s doctrine, and if you knew it because you had lived when He lived and you d followed Him around and you d heard every one of His messages and you had learned His doctrine through and through and you knew it, even that would not make you a disciple. Historical contemporaneity, then, does not make one a contemporary of Christ as a disciple. The first matter, historical contemporaneity, is a historical matter; but the second matter, being a contemporary of Christ as His disciple, is a spiritual matter. Kierkegaard makes this point in The Fragments on page 83. We might ask how then do you become a disciple? And Kierkegaard takes up this question. He says that you become a disciple of Christ by becoming spiritually contemporaneous with Christ not historically, we can t do that but spiritually contemporaneous with Christ. This happens, he says, in the instant of encounter, when Christ discloses Himself and the person responds to Christ with the faith that God has given to the person. This is central, he says, to Christianity and to becoming a Christian. You ll find these ideas elaborated on page 79 of The Fragments. Kierkegaard makes it very clear, in his discussion of discipleship, 4 of 14
that discipleship and eternal happiness cannot be based at all on a historical fact. It must, instead, be based, he says, on a relationship a relationship with God through Christ, which you receive in the encounter. The true disciple, then, who lives after the time of Jesus Christ, as a matter of fact, Kierkegaard says, has more of a true contemporaneity with the paradox that is, with Jesus, who is the absolute paradox. This individual, then, who is a true disciple who lives, say, even in our time, has more of a contemporaneity with the paradox than the person who historically lived at the time of Jesus but never really became a disciple. Kierkegaard says, then, that there is no such thing as a disciple at secondhand. What he means by that is there is no such thing as simply being a person who lives at a different generation and has no relationship to Christ, but somehow or other is His disciple anyway. If you are merely at secondhand, you re not going to be a disciple. The person who lives in a later generation, who hears about Christ and responds to Him, is not a disciple at secondhand. If he is a disciple, he is not at secondhand, according to Kierkegaard. He s contemporaneous, and he s contemporaneous because he is spiritually, immediately relating himself to Christ. That s what it means to be a disciple, according to Kierkegaard. If he s merely at secondhand, that is, if he merely lives at a later generation, then he s not going to be a disciple. He is neither contemporary in the historical sense, which, of course, Kierkegaard is saying doesn t matter anyway, nor is he a contemporary in the spiritual sense. So what it means to be a disciple of Christ, according to Kierkegaard, is that you become spiritually a contemporary of Jesus Christ. And you can do that whether you live historically at the time when Jesus walked the earth, or whether you live at this time in history, or any other time in history. Hearing this, you might say, well, then, what advantage was there to having historical contemporaneity with Christ at all? It doesn t seem that it would have accomplished anything for you. Well, Kierkegaard says there are certain advantages that people had who lived in the time of Jesus, but they are not going to be advantages that make much difference to our eternal destiny. Being a contemporary of Jesus Christ, historically, allows you to be if we had been in that position would have allowed us to get a better historical knowledge as an eyewitness of the life of Christ. But, of course, that s not really very important to any spiritual matter that involves our relationship to God. In addition, Kierkegaard says that the person who was historically 5 of 14
contemporary might have found certain occasions on which he followed Jesus, heard Jesus preach, whatever it might have been. He might have found certain occasions where he could have gotten a better Socratic deepening of self-knowledge about himself; but, again, that s not very important. What we want is not self-knowledge that we gain by reflecting about ourselves. What we need is the eternal knowledge, which comes only in the instant when we encounter Christ. Another thing that could be advantageous to someone who lived at the time of Christ is that living at that point might also have provided an occasion for the eternal to break through and encounter him in the instant. But, really, this is not any great advantage, as we ve suggested already, because anybody at any time in history may with equal ease become a spiritual contemporary of Christ. Kierkegaard says, then, the contemporary in the immediate sense, then, that is, the one who lived historically at the time of Jesus, really only has the advantage that the message or the truth about faith and the encounter would not, at the time of Christ, have had as much chance to be distorted as that message would be distorted in succeeding and following generations. So the advantage that the person living at the time of Christ would have is that he could hear the message very plainly, very clearly, without the distortions that had attached to it over the centuries. You can see, then, there really isn t much advantage at all to having lived at the time of Christ. Let me move on and say something further about Kierkegaard s understanding of Christianity. He also wants to talk, and does talk, about the relation of Christianity to history and the historical. Kierkegaard says that it is absolutely crucial that God has been in human flesh. In other words, the historicity of Christ is important, according to Kierkegaard. However, its importance is not so that we can have a fact or a series of facts to place our faith in. Instead, its importance is that there is really some object for faith to grasp. Thus, if somebody tells you that Christ actually lived, that won t make you have faith; but if the encounter comes, it will assure you that your faith, when you respond to the encounter, actually has an object, rather than being a leap into the dark. Kierkegaard makes these points in The Philosophical Fragments on pages 129-130. That speaks of the historicity of Jesus Christ, but Kierkegaard also speaks about the place of Scripture. And, of course, Scripture are historical documents, that is, they include history, but beyond 6 of 14
that, they were written at various times in history. What does he say about the place of Scripture in Christianity and the importance of this form of history? Kierkegaard says that Scripture is merely a historical record of what Christ said and did. According to Kierkegaard, any historical account is only an approximation of what the truth is, and no approximation can be the basis for an eternal happiness. Kierkegaard makes this point very strongly in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, page 25. Kierkegaard, then, says further that neither defending the Bible s accuracy or attacking the Bible s accuracy, as an objective account of what happened, has any bearing whatsoever on faith and eternal happiness. Its accuracy, its inaccuracy, what we would call its inerrancy, is really unimportant in terms of one s faith and one s eternal destiny. Kierkegaard says Look, nobody has ever acquired faith by acquiring Scripture or by having Scripture defend it. He makes this point in Concluding Unscientific Postscript on pages 29 and then again on page 30. So don t think that by having a copy of Scripture, somehow or other, you will be guaranteed that you re not believing in something that s very fanciful. Kierkegaard makes it very, very clear that you don t want to rest your eternal destiny on something that is so tenuous as a historical contingent book that doesn t have to have been written and may, in fact, not actually be true. He also says that no one who has faith has ever been harmed by the attack on Scripture, nor has Christianity been ruined by such attacks. He makes this point on page 31 of the Postscript. His thought is that genuine faith is not something that s going to rest on historical documents anyway, so that if somebody begins to attack Scripture, its accuracy, its veracity, that really isn t going to affect true Christianity and it s not going to affect true faith. The reason that this is so, in part, of course, is that Kierkegaard believes that Christianity is inwardness and subjectivity, whereas Scripture and all other objective witnesses to the life of Christ, to the truth of Christianity, are external in their objective. And because they are external to our relationship with God, and because they are objective, they provide no basis whatsoever for faith or for eternal happiness, because our faith is something that is very subjective. It involves our personal relationship with God. The best that we can say for these objective things, like Scripture, is that they provide an occasion for human beings to encounter God and to respond to Him through the faith that He gives. Here you might want to consult the Postscript, page 33, for these ideas. 7 of 14
That gives you some of Kierkegaard s thinking on the nature of Christianity. Let me move on now to see with you what he has to say about the relationship of reason to faith. First of all, he talks about the objectivity and the subjectivity in faith. On page 540 of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, we have his definition of faith. Let me read it to you. You may have read it or heard it at some other point. It s a brief one, but I think it encapsulates his thinking, and you ll see that it fits with what he said in Fear and Trembling. He says, Faith is the objective uncertainty due to the repulsion of the absurd, held fast by the passion of inwardness, which, in this instance, is intensified to the utmost degree. Faith is the objective uncertainty, he says. What we believe in we have no objective grounds for believing. In fact, when you look at the objective case for the thing we believe in, you realize that it s absolutely absurd to believe in this, because there s no evidence that supports it. In fact, if there s any evidence whatsoever, it may refute the idea that we re believing it. And yet, we hold onto it with great passion. He says we hold this belief in that which is absurd. We hold it fast by the passion of inwardness. You can see that, for him, you cannot exercise faith dispassionately or disinterestedly. You can t be like the Hegelians, who sit there and disinterestedly spin out this great philosophical system and talk about faith as an abstract concept. No, faith for Kierkegaard involves great passion. It involves inwardness. It doesn t involve outward objectivity and the things that attach to objectivity. And he says in this case, of course, the faith, the inwardness, the passion is intensified to the utmost degree. Faith, then, is a subjective passion in response to the paradox which gives man the faith to respond. Faith, according to Kierkegaard, cannot be grounded on anything that s objective. Anything objective, like history or Scripture or anything like that is only an approximation of the truth anyway, and it s not capable of giving us an eternal happiness. Any objective facts or objects are only points of reference, but they re not reasons for having faith. All objective reference points are unconvincing. It s only God who can give you faith, and that faith must be in the paradox as its objects. Faith, therefore, demands a leap that is not based on anything objective. It s not based on any evidence. The only thing that draws one toward the paradox is the passionate faith that God 8 of 14
gives to one, a faith that is not based on anything objective. In Kierkegaard s Journal, he says that by the term leap, he does not mean a senseless hurdling of yourself on the holy. But he means, instead, a bold act of obedience to the God who meaningfully reveals Himself in the paradox. You hear that, and you say, There s no room for reason whatsoever in exercising faith. Well, hang on for just a moment. Let s see what Kierkegaard has to say about reason s part in faith. We ve already seen, in Fear and Trembling, that faith transcends reason. That, of course, was part of the point of Fear and Trembling. Kierkegaard says further that faith in God cannot be either rationally or empirically grounded. It can t be empirically grounded, because God, by nature, is trans-empirical. You can t just go out into the external physical world and hunt for God and see Him there. He s beyond that. Evidence that s available there to us just shows Christ to be a very strange and a humble man. But it doesn t prove that He s the God-man. Faith cannot be grounded rationally, says Kierkegaard, because man cannot comprehend the transcendent. The best that we can do is to take the qualities of human beings and let them point in God s direction, but that won t really tell us what God is like. It s going to be only an approximation. The function of reason, then, in faith and paradox is to comprehend that the paradox cannot be comprehended. In other words, the role of reason is to see that reason is not going to get you to faith in God. Reason cannot show that the paradox is contradictory, according to Kierkegaard, but it can show us, at least, that we re not going to be able to get to faith simply by reason. Essentially what Kierkegaard is doing here is making a distinction or whether he s making it or not I think we can make a distinction between something being either according to reason or against reason or above reason. If we think in those terms, then what Kierkegaard is saying is that reason can distinguish that there are these three relationships that an idea may have to reason. But it s only a leap of faith that can get a person to the paradox which turns out to be above reason. The paradox is not according to reason or against reason, it s above it. One other thing I should say here about Kierkegaard on reason and faith. According to Kierkegaard, reason s role in relation to the object of faith, which is the paradox, is that reason can distinguish between nonsense and paradox. Reason cannot 9 of 14
understand either of those or get you into possession of either of those, but it can only lead you into a point where you can tell the difference. And, of course, what he s saying is that the truth of Christianity is not nonsense, but it s paradoxical. And reason can at least help you to see the difference between the two and then prepare you for the point when God will break through, but it s only a leap of faith that can actually get you to the paradox when the paradox breaks through in the instant of encounter. Let me move on to another idea, namely Kierkegaard s view of truth as subjectivity. We see this idea primarily in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. When Kierkegaard talks about truth as subjectivity, he doesn t mean that there s no objective truth whatsoever. What he means is that objective truth does not make a person a Christian. He s talking, then, about Christian truth. And he s saying that is subjective, not objective, because there s no objective truth which could make a person become a Christian. Objective truth, he says, does not determine Christianity. It doesn t determine what it is or to make a person a Christian, because Christian truth is not in the mind. Instead, it is appropriated by the will. Kierkegaard, then, is emphasizing a difference between truth in commitment a truth that you get by committing your will as opposed to truth that comes in contemplation: intellectual, mental truth. He s opposing the two, and he says that what is genuinely true in Christianity, the nature of Christian truth, is that it s a truth of commitment. This, of course, is radically opposed to Hegel, who had said that truth is to be found in contemplation. I should add, as well, that Kierkegaard is not saying that all forms of subjectivity are true. For example, there are people who are intellectually mentally deficient. Maybe they are, in terms of their IQ, an idiot. Now these people, we would say, are surely wrapped in a certain kind of subjectivity, but that s not truth. That s not the kind of truth as subjectivity that he is talking about, nor is it the case that all truth is subjective. For example, there are truths of history. Those things are objective, and indeed they are true. What Kierkegaard is saying, instead, is that all religious truth is subjective. There s a passage in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript where Kierkegaard is talking about subjectivity and the need to be personally involved and committed. He talks about a man who prays earnestly to an idol. He compares that individual to another individual who has all the right doctrine but prays to the God of 10 of 14
Scripture, prays to the God of that true doctrine, hypocritically. What Kierkegaard says is that the man who is praying with earnestness to this idol, as a matter of fact, is more in possession of genuine truth than the person who prays hypocritically to the true God. If the pagan s faith were placed in the right object, then he d be all set; but the person who has the right object of faith, but has a phony inward response, has no hope whatsoever. Subjectivity as truth, for Kierkegaard, also involves viewing God not as an objective observer but as a participator. The only way to find God is not to observe Him or to look for Him, but to respond to Him in obedience. This is faith, which is a subjective response, as Kierkegaard lays it out. In order to get the subjective truth of faith, one has to relate oneself to God as a subject, not as an object. Even though, of course, God is really out there, we can t treat Him as an object. We have to, instead, treat Him as a person. How do you go about gaining subjective truth? Kierkegaard, I think we could say, really gives us four steps to attaining subjective truth. The first step is that we have to reject the outward objective orientation to things. In other words, we must reject life lived at the aesthetic level, where we are simply pulled one way or another by anything external to us. The second step is that we have to develop a responsible inwardness of duty. In other words, we have to think at the ethical level and live at the ethical level. But it can t end there. The third step in this process is that we must have a passionate concern for eternal blessedness more than anything else in our lives. And Kierkegaard defines living in this way as living at the level of the religious, but within the level of the religious he distinguishes between Religiosity A and Religiosity B. Now just simply having a passionate concern for eternal blessedness more than anything else is living at the level of Religiosity A. But then the fourth step is that we must receive the paradoxical revelation of God in Christ, which is most disturbingly subjective, Kierkegaard says. When we do that, we re living at the level of Religiosity B. There is, I think, a certain problem in understanding Kierkegaard s meaning regarding subjectivity as truth, because what he really means is that subjectivity is the condition for religious truth religious truth involving one s relationship with God. You may say, well, why didn t Kierkegaard just put it that way? Well, I think he was forced to put it in the way that he does because he reacts against the Hegelian context in which he lived, in which everybody was saying Objectivity is truth. Hegel identified objective truth with the 11 of 14
rational. Hegel put out his rational system, but he left himself the subject out of the system, as he stood outside of that system and spun it out. Kierkegaard s contention is that Hegel ignored the main thing: the subject, the person. That s why he says truth is subjectivity. Kierkegaard is saying, then, that real truth is not in the rational system that one can spin out, but real truth is in the person, the subject who spins it out. That gives you something of Kierkegaard s views on truth as subjectivity. I think they have been much misunderstood, and many people have taken them to mean that Kierkegaard is basically in favor of irrationalism; but I think when you understand what he s saying in the context of his time, that s really not the point that he s making. He s just really trying to emphasize, against the dead orthodoxy of his day, that people cannot look at religion as something that s just out there. It s objective, and you don t have to be personally related, personally involved with it at all. Instead, Kierkegaard is saying, you have to be passionately involved. What happens in religion must involve your personal relationship and your personal involvement. Let me turn now to look at Kierkegaard s work, Training in Christianity. This work was published in 1850, and I think it shares with us something further of Kierkegaard s understanding of what it means to be a Christian. It is said that this particular work, The Training in Christianity, was Kierkegaard s favorite of all of his works. In this work, he addresses what was the key issue for him in all of his writings, namely what does it mean to be a Christian in Christendom? In this work, he gives his most definitive answer of all. As Robert Bretall says, in his introduction in his anthology of Kierkegaard s works, for Kierkegaard, Christianity is, and I quote Bretall, to become contemporary with Christ in His suffering and humiliation, to be and act as the apostles did when they followed Christ as the Holy One, in spite of the world s rejection of Him, in spite of the social and intellectual stigma involved in doing so. In contrast to the person who becomes a contemporary and here one has to think of what Kierkegaard means by becoming contemporary in the sense that I explained that he was using in The Philosophical Fragments. In contrast to the person who becomes a contemporary, there is the individual who believes as a result of the 1800 years of church history, or what Kierkegaard refers to as the upshot, the historical results of Christ s existence. In this work, Kierkegaard compares those two people: the person who believes because of the results of Christ being on earth, the 12 of 14
1800 years (at the time Kierkegaard lived) of church history, as opposed to the person who becomes a spiritual contemporary of Christ. The person who becomes a Christian, or tries to become a Christian, on the basis of the result of the 1800 years of church history, is basing his belief on evidence. But Kierkegaard has already said in his earlier works, as we ve seen, that the best historical evidence, or any other kind of evidence can produce for us, is an approximation to the truth. And none of that can reasonably be seen as the basis of an eternal happiness. In fact, according to Kierkegaard, genuine faith recognizes that Christianity s basic claims do not make rational sense, that is, they are paradoxical. By paradox he means above reason, not against reason. Nevertheless, the genuine Christian believes and becomes a Christian, according to Kierkegaard, by becoming contemporary with Christ in the encounter, by becoming spiritually contemporary. What he learns does not make rational sense, but he grasps it in faith in a way that s beyond reason. Now Kierkegaard further says that contemporaneousness with Christ involves also the possibility of the offense, that is, in the encounter you come in contact with something that is paradoxical. And what is paradoxical namely, Christ and His teachings may also be offensive to the intellect. As Bretall notes, Kierkegaard presents three basic possibilities with respect to the way you might respond to Christ. At one extreme, you may become offended. At the other extreme, according to Kierkegaard, one never has so much as even the possibility of being offended. Now in between those two extremes lies Christianity. Christianity is the possibility of the offense, along with the refusal to be offended, according to Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, the worst of these three positions is the second extreme: the extreme where you don t even have a possibility of becoming offended. The reason that you don t is because you don t care about this enough to have it bother you at all. And Kierkegaard says that s the worst of all three of the positions, and his complaint was that, as he looked around him in Denmark, he felt that that s precisely where many people were in a world where everyone was considered, as a matter of course, to be a Christian just because they were born in a Christian country, and they d been baptized early in life. Nobody was ever really forced, seriously, to confront who Christ was and what He claimed. As a result, there wasn t a chance that any of these people might 13 of 14
become offended at Him. For the person who is offended, at least he is somehow involved in the matter, and at some later time, there may be the possibility that he will cease to be offended. But the person who doesn t even know that there s an offense out there lacks the possibility of ever putting himself in the frame of mind where that offense may be turned to faith. And Kierkegaard s quarrel with modern Christianity is that it has taken away the possibility of the offense by focusing instead on the 1800 years, what Kierkegaard calls the upshot, the glorious results of Christ s life. By doing this, you could somehow or other convince yourself that you were on the winning side and attach yourself easily to Christianity. Kierkegaard says that being a Christian in that kind of situation is doing what s fashionable to do. But these sorts of things, according to Kierkegaard, have nothing to do whatsoever with being a real Christian. As to what Kierkegaard thinks real Christianity is about, we will pick that up in the next lecture, as we finish off our thinking on Kierkegaard and then move on to the thought of Karl Barth. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 14 of 14